Let me pray first, and we'll get started. Father God, thank you for another day. Lord, as we look at the subject of evil and suffering in the world, I pray that you would remind us of what your Spirit says about this. In the book of Job, and in Romans 9, and in other places, you are sovereign over all that is good, and all that is evil. And Lord, I pray that we would not shrink back and presume to limit that sovereignty, and that we would apply these truths from Your Scripture to our conversations with unbelievers, that we would not seek to get You off the hook, where You have not given that to us. But as Your Word says, the creation itself was subjected to futility, not willingly, but by Him who subjected it in hope. We pray, Lord, that You would give us a glimpse of how we should view evil and how we should help others be able to answer these questions. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, so what I'm going to do in the final two weeks, unfortunately, It's misleading to call this the whole class on apologetics. There's a whole lot we're not going to get to. But what we are going to get to is the so-called problem of evil. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to tackle it in two parts. Today we're going to do the negative part, the ground clearing. We're going to criticize the so-called problem of evil, and I'm calling this the problem of saying evil. And then once we clear that hurdle, then we're going to do a positive defense of God's use of evil. And there's a technical term for that in apologetics, it's called theodicy, which is kind of a, you might think that's a bizarre word, but that's when you're defending the ways of God, in particular, in the use of evil. So, let's do the negative part first today, and I call this the problem of saying evil, or the biblical way to answer this most nagging objection. And it's simply this. If a good God made the world, then why is it the way it is? That is the nagging, persistent objection at the heart of most other doubts. The so-called problem of evil is probably the most ingrained objection against the Christian faith. It might not always be the most prevalent objection in terms of its frequency. But it is the most prevalent in the sense that it's always under the surface and it begins to reveal the real emotional and moral traumas within the psyche of the unbeliever and probably for believers as well. We still have these questions. But what we have to understand is that the problem of evil is a problem for the unbeliever. I'm speaking of the philosophical problem of evil. The pastoral problem of evil is a problem for everybody. And so I'm not trying to minimize that at all. But when we're doing apologetics, let's just isolate this for a second as the philosophical problem of evil. That is a problem only for the unbeliever. The biblical Christian has an explanation for evil. The unbeliever does not. And if that's too confusing because we live in a postmodern age where we're all supposed to be humble and admit that we don't know anything, Let me say it this way, the Bible has an answer for the problem of evil and the unbeliever does not. So the problem of evil is better called the problem of saying evil. What is it? How can we speak about evil if there's no such thing as good? And what is good? Now, please note that this is where you will be accused by unbeliever and, unfortunately nowadays, by believer alike of being heartless. If you seek to answer this problem in a definitive way at all, the fact is that your answer will be so invincible that the only response will be a kind of emotional demonizing pressure that says something like, you can't say that to somebody on their deathbed. I got that one time. at a study group downtown when we were doing some apologetics, and we had some unbelievers. And we had the unbelievers on the hook, the atheists. It's interesting, sorry. But the unbelievers, and I knew this guy, he was an atheist, I had worked with him previously, and there was another unbelieving friend that he brought, and they were bringing up, hey, what about predestination? Hey, what do you say about this? Was God there when so-and-so... And they don't buy the Arminian answers. The unbelievers already know about election and predestination and hell and stuff like that. There you know about it. All we're doing is insulting their intelligence by trying to get God off the hook. And one of the things that was said to me at that time was, ooh, but you can't say that to somebody on their deathbed. or somebody that's in the middle of pain, they don't need an equation or a formula, but this is blatant hypocrisy. The unbeliever has raised the objection in the midst of affluence, and he has raised it as a logical problem, or as an evidential problem, not openly and honestly as an emotional struggle. Now, they could, and they should, and we all should deal with it as an actual emotional struggle, but that's not what's going on here, and so we need to be honest about that. The vast majority of modern Christian thinking on this subject is a pathetic attempt to get God off the hook, and our anemic philosophies of ministry then follow this same program. Too many Christians have become convinced that the better our answer, the more heartless our approach to real people with real problems. But this is exactly reverse. This is backwards. What a person needs when they're suffering is a sufficient conviction of God's goodness, God's wisdom, and God's power, preferably before suffering hits, so that their grip on their eternal reward is not shaken. You know what's really heartless? What's really heartless is to paint the picture of reality where suffering is unintelligible. It's really heartless to present a gospel in a Christianity where God only blesses us, where we have that owed to us, where that's normal. That is heartless. We need to not understate the irrationality of the skeptic's position, and we need to do that precisely for the sufferer. It's the skeptic's vicious lies that the sufferer will hear, which will cause all the more suffering and all the more confusion and despair. So what we're going to do is divide this into three sections. The logical problem of evil, the evidential problem, and then, so, let's just spell it all out. Section 1. Section 2 almost doesn't deserve its own section because we're going to see it never really gets away. It tries to smuggle this back in. That's a hint. And then thirdly, we're going to get to the nature and the origin of evil, which is going to bring us full circle and further cement our conviction here that this is the unbeliever's problem. nature and the origin of evil. Or, not just the unbeliever's problem, but any believer who would give us an unbelieving system of theology. there's going to be a problem of saying evil as well. So let's first tackle the logical problem of evil. And the basic definition of it, the form of it, was classically summarized by David Hume. And this is in the 18th century. It's in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It's a very short mini-paragraph. Here's the basic problem. He says, quote, is he, namely is God, willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Now, you might remember when we talked about the philosophical argument for atheism, that it involves one of two things. Either God is incoherent with himself, or God is incoherent with the world. So, let's start to I won't use those magnets, I was tempted to. Some attributes of God. Omnipotence, and he lists goodness. Now, I'm going to add one more in just a second, but Hume doesn't specifically address it. And then these are going to be related to the world. And so we're going to put one more attribute in there, and that's evil, this being an attribute of the world. So clearly, the problem of evil is going to be a God versus world kind of logical problem. They don't go together, can't go together, incoherent. That's what I mean by philosophical or logical problem. In the world, we have evil. If God is good, and evil exists, then he must be unable to stop it. But if he is able, but doesn't, then it would seem that he's not good. So you see what Hume is doing. He's just working with those two attributes, and either way you turn, you lose one of the attributes of God, or you deny that evil exists. You can say it's an illusion. Well, maybe God is willing, Maybe he is able, if only he knew how, but doesn't. So we really have to add one more attribute, because you could say, well, maybe he is able, maybe he does want to, he just doesn't know how. He wishes he was there, but he missed the turn that day, or that hurricane, or that earthquake, or that other disaster. So let's put omniscience. So here's my three attributes of God, and we're going to add a fourth attribute that supposedly doesn't go together with these, and that's of the world. That's why we're using a different color. First thing we have to notice about the logical problem of evil is that the objection depends on the reality that one or more of these four attributes doesn't go together. divine omniscience, evil in the world. One of these or more must be utterly incompatible with one or more of the others. The terms must be mutually exclusive of each other in the same way as square circles, or married bachelors, or this pen is not a pen. It must amount to that. That's what we would mean by a contradiction. Hume, or the skeptic, is trying to show that one or more of these can't go together in the same way as a square circle can't go together. He can't have a square circle, or this pen is not a pen. If it's a pen, then it is a pen. It's not not a pen at the same time and in the same relationship. So Hume, the burden is, he has to show how one of these, the same thing's happening. That's what logic does. And so, that functions as excluding one or more of the divine attributes. But here's my first question to the skeptic and my first question to you, and I'll come back to this question once we tease it out a little bit more, because it's going to be the fundamental question. What do we need to know in order to establish that claim, that evil can't go together with the divine attributes? with one or more of these attributes. What would we have to know to know that? That's the question I want us to consider as we look at everything else. And what I want to show is that there are two things, at least, two things one would need to know to show that evil in the world negates the possibility of God's existence. Two things you need to know to establish the skeptic's claim. Number one, the first thing you need to know is a definition of good sufficient to say that evil is really incompatible with it. So you follow me so far? You need a definition of good that's sufficient to show that evil is really incompatible with it. That's the first thing you need. You need a definition of good. Not too hard. But the second thing you need is to know every single possible way in which God either could or would bring good out of any particular instance of evil. So what's going to happen as you flow from the logical to the evidential problem is you'll start to see backpedaling on the atheist part. If they understand even a little bit, even what our kindergartners understand about logic, and most atheists don't, but once they start to get to that point and move over here, they're going to have to stay Okay, I can't show that these don't go together per se, but how could God possibly justify that kind of evil, that intensity of suffering, that scope of evil, and so on? What good could He possibly bring out of that? And so that's the second thing I'll need to know. I'll have to know all the possible ways that God either would or could bring good out of the evil. So let's just shorthand that. Know all the possible good uses. And we'll introduce the idea of sufficiently good use in just a little bit. But I'm going to need to know a good that is sufficient to call something evil, and I'm going to have to know God's possible uses of it if they actually clear that hurdle. In other words, I'm going to need divine goodness and divine omniscience in order to show that God cannot exist because evil does. And what I'm going to do in the next ten minutes is to show you how that is. But as we go there, let me just show you what I'm doing. To say that I'm going to need perfect, eternal, unchanging goodness, a standard of goodness, and all the different outcomes, in other words, omniscience, That's really only another way to say that in order for the moral argument against God to work, God is going to have to exist. But let's just draw that out for just a second. And this will be no different than all the other philosophical arguments against God. You need God's attribute to exist in order to show what that attribute either would or could not do, right? So there's never been design in the universe. Well, how do you know that? Well, because there's so much wasted this or that, compared to what? This thing that's never existed nor ever could? Well, omnipotence, if God is all-powerful, then he ought to be able to do such and such. Therefore, there's no all-powerful being. So, all-powerfulness doesn't exist, but it would or could do such and such. So a square circle would or could do what? So you see what's happening is every argument against God depends upon the existence of God in order to show what that attribute either would or could not do. If it's never existed, nor could it, then it couldn't do anything. A square circle doesn't have anything. So you can't start talking about what a square circle would or could do. or at least what he was assuming in his statement. He begins by saying, is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Now, I would say to that, so far, so good. Really, Hume is doing nothing more than to pose power against the negation of power. If God is wanting to prevent it, but he can't, well, then he lacks the power. There goes divine omnipotence. Well, I agree with you as far as that goes. If he's not omnipotent, then he's not omnipotent. I'll give you that. That's just analytically the case. Okay, so Hume is leaving intent off the table in that first sentence. But take a good look at the second question. the rest of Hume's statement, and see if anything starts to get smuggled in. He says, is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is God able to stop evil, but not willing? Then he's evil for not doing so. So Hume is assuming here that if God is able to stop evil, but does not, then he is evil. Follow-up question. Which evil is Hume talking about? Does he mean real evil, which exists in particular instances, or does he mean merely the idea of it? Does he mean all evil, that God would stop all evil, or only some evil? Does Hume mean that God would stop evil presently, or finally, or just absolutely no evil could possibly ever exist? Now, as I draw this out, you're going to see the relevance of asking those particular follow-up questions. Which of those do you mean, Hume? Because any of them are going to land you in absurdity. Let's start to draw it out. Number one, suppose what Hume really means is that good per se cannot exist with evil per se. Let's put it over here. Let's assume that what he means, option one, do you mean that good can never, can never coexist with evil, ever, in any sense. So let's put good per se versus evil per se. The very existence of it, in any sense, cannot coexist with the other. Is that what you mean, David Hume? Well, if it is, he's got a problem. If good cannot coexist with evil, then if evil exists, and that's his argument, it's one of his premises, evil exists, good does not. You see that so far. If good cannot coexist with evil, and evil does exist by the law of the excluded middle, good does not. Problem. If good does not exist, then evil is a meaningless concept, for it depends upon a real standard to which the evil thing does not measure up. Hence, if there is no such thing as good, there can be no such thing as evil. Therefore, the argument that good and evil cannot coexist is self-refuting. Now, even if Hume does not explicitly mean this, we're going to start to see that whatever else he does mean is going to collapse into that same logical black hole. Suppose now, number two, that he means a good personal being cannot coexist with evil per se. And he says, OK, no, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that a good personal being cannot coexist with evil. Okay? That's the second possibility. But then Hume cannot exist. because he at least is a personal being capable of condemning all such evil. Of course, that's not what he has in mind. There's a particular personal being that Hume has in mind, but the problem won't go away for the objector. If a perfectly good being cannot coexist with evil precisely because he would destroy it, then it would seem that this good personal being would have to know both what evil is and what that particular instance of evil is. So, if I'm a good personal being and the whole qualification for being a good personal being, such as Hume means, he means God, is that I would have to just destroy, here's a gun, I don't know, he'd have to just destroy evil on contact, and I mean the idea of evil, all evil, and I mean each particular evil. Well, we've got a problem, because I'm going to need to know at least two things. I'm going to need to know what evil is, in which case I'll have to know what good is, so you're right back to the first problem, and I'm going to have to know exactly how evil and where evil exists in each particular case. So we're going to have another knowledge problem to this issue. Now it gets thicker. Because unfortunately for our objector, Mr. Hume, if such a being must do this of necessity, must eliminate all evil in all cases, then he would have to do it instantaneously. Remember, the whole argument is that one cannot coexist with the other. Logically, of necessity, cannot coexist with the other. But unfortunately, if this great personal being did that instantaneously in every case, then evil could never exist in any form at any point. even in his mind. Evil would be a logical impossibility, and no mind, not even an all-knowing mind, could possibly attribute anything to it, because then it would be a square circle by his definition. Therefore, it would be impossible for an all-knowing mind to know evil, where it would not be a thing, but a meaningless combination of words like a square circle. So according to this argument, the coexistence of evil in any case with a good personal being would be a logical contradiction. And so consequently, the standard breaks down. must eliminate all evil in all cases, but could never know what he's eliminating because it could never exist in any case. Same reason the kids can't draw a square circle no matter how many times they try on the board. According to this argument, God could never know what evil is because evil would be a contradiction to coexist with him. And so it would be impossible to conceive of evil in order to destroy it. Now, the moment that we backpedal and say, no, no, that's not what I mean. It could exist at a point just so that God could annihilate it. Or no, no, no, an evil thought or a thought about evil, it could exist in this mind, it could exist for a moment in history. But I have to ask at that point, what's the real difference between that and what the Christian argument is? The argument's starting to dissipate and turn into what we're saying. And so maybe let's give Hume one more chance. Maybe he could mean something else. Suppose you raise the stakes by saying that a being good enough to be the standard of goodness and powerful enough to stop anything which opposes it would certainly do so. He would stop it before it does any real harm. Well, the question is actually not mere ability for Hume at this point, but also it includes intent. A good God not only could stop all or much evil, but he most certainly would stop this evil. That's in Hume's statement, is he able, but not willing, then he is malevolent. If God is not willing to stop all evil and he is not good. But again, on what basis does Hume make this claim? Is this really the sort of thing on which logic can decide anymore? that God should allow evil to continue until one final victory might violate our sensibilities, but as we can see right here, it doesn't violate any law of logic. In fact, Hume, in order to make this respectable, would have to say, no, it can exist for a time. I agree. I agree completely. So, in other words, what we've been calling the logical problem of evil is really at best an evidential argument which works by greater or lesser degrees of probability. In other words, what we're saying is, well, considering this kind of evil and this kind of evil, and this 9-11, and this Hurricane Katrina, and this ISIS, and this instance of animal suffering, or child abuse, or come on, can you really justify that? And so you start getting down here, away from good and evil as an idea, and you start getting into the concrete particulars. And where the evidence is, That's where all the emotion is, too, in the concrete particulars. And so what we're going to see is that the evidential problem is really just a repackaging of this, but it has an advantage. It has a smokescreen of emotions behind it. And so we don't notice that it's really just regurgitating the same thing that Hume failed at. So we're going to see that the so-called evidential problem of evil suffers the same fate. This is our second point. Atheists following David Hume, and especially in the 20th century, have understood the failure to state the problem of evil in logical terms. They realize that you can't actually say that these don't go together. A, we don't have enough information about God's use of evil. Secondly, in order to say that they don't cohere, the terms have to represent actual, existent things, which if your argument follows through, those things don't exist, nor could they. So the whole argument collapses logically. You can't actually make a logical argument if you know anything about logic. Okay, and so atheists have had to switch grounds. Well, J.L. Mackey was one more modern atheist who attempted to keep Hume's flat earth society afloat. He did so by injecting more meaning into each premise. So what he does is he takes Hume's argument and all he does is he shuffles it around a little bit so that you don't realize he's really saying the same thing. He says this, here's his definition. Good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can, and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. So good always eliminates evil as far as it can. and that there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. So, to the latter, no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. We've already seen, I think it was last week when we looked at Lewis's problem with pain, omnipotence means only the power to do all things. In other words, A thing can't be intrinsically impossible. It can't be a square circle. So God can't draw a square circle either. That's no limitation to His power. It's that a square circle is a meaningless concept. It would actually be a deprivation of being and an impossibility. To the former part, a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can. As we've just demonstrated, If a good thing always eliminates a bad thing instantaneously, then either evil never exists because good does, or good never exists because there is a problem of evil, which is self-refuting. And so Mackey's attempt to pump new life into Hume's dying system is instantly futile. Now, there's another philosopher that admits, as he starts to look at the evidence and he brings in examples of pain, He uses the example of a parent administering medicine to a sick child, and he's reckoning with the Christian argument that you don't have enough information. And so what he says, and I always chuckle as I read this statement, he says, the fact that someone, a parent, knowingly caused discomfort is not sufficient to remove the parent from the class of perfectly good beings. As a general statement, a being who permits or brings about an instance of suffering might be a perfectly good being, providing only that there is a morally sufficient reason for his action." That's going to be our key, and that's why I've read that quote, because what's going to happen in the evidential problem of evil is that these things are going to be looked at, and at the end of the day, the whole argument is going to depend, and always come back to, there's no morally sufficient reason for that particular kind of evil, that particular instance or intensity of suffering, and so on. So there's a new premise inserted in. And it's not an evidential premise. It's a logical premise. It's a philosophy. It's a presupposition. And here it is. An omnipotent and omniscient being would have no morally sufficient reason for allowing instances of suffering, or allowing x amount of suffering. You can play with that a little bit. An omnipotent and omniscient being would have no morally sufficient reason for allowing instances of suffering. Now, demonstrating that is going to be a pretty tall order. he would have no morally sufficient reason for allowing X instance of suffering. It doesn't matter what you fill in X with. Well, what's meant by a morally sufficient reason? What could that term possibly mean? Who cares what it means for this or that philosopher? What could a morally sufficient reason mean? What reason would count as sufficient? without also meaning good enough to justify that use of evil. So what's going to happen right now is that the atheist is going to play a card trick on himself. I don't even think he can see it. Is that if I say morally sufficient reason to justify something for x, isn't that just a synonym for good enough reason? Doesn't morally sufficient mean Good enough? And if something's good enough, isn't there a good? So, by what standard do you measure the good enough reason? And the moment we see that sufficient to justify X evil means the exact same thing as good enough to justify X evil, we find ourselves right back where we started. In other words, there has to be a transcendent moral good. And so the skeptical philosopher has not moved from the logical problem to an evidential problem at all, simply because his focus has moved down from philosophical terms down to the particular instances of evil. But the advantage that he has is that he's able to judge the sufficiently good. is that he gets to cloak this same flawed logic in down here where all the flesh and blood suffering is. And so you see this when this subject comes up. You start to see they no longer have to answer for the nonsense. They simply have to point to that and say, oh yeah, what about that? And it's something that tugs on our heartstrings. And it's something that maybe we've experienced at some level or whatever else. But behind all of this is the thought If I do not know why such evil makes sense, then it follows that such evil makes no sense. See, we might want to change that logic, and we might want to say, no, that's not what I'm saying. No, it's the only thing you could be saying. It's the only thing that this argument means. If I don't see how that makes sense, if I don't see what God's doing with that, if I do see part of what God's doing with it, but I judge it to be morally insufficient, then it is, because I know what's morally sufficient. In other words, I'm claiming to myself omniscience, among other things. That is the problem. In fact, one would have to be omniscient in order to demonstrate the logical problem of evil, since one would have to know all possible good reasons for God to decree evil in order to say that none of them are really good, or none of them really work in the end. You would have to know all of them in order to say that none of them. So you need to be omniscient in order to make good on the logical problem of evil. So, let's move on to the nature and origin of evil, because that's really the problem that this all comes back down to. So again, hopefully you caught that. The evidential problem of evil really just is the logical problem repackaged, but now all you're doing is bringing it down to the particulars of this world and hiding the same flawed logic behind all the emotion. But the problem remains, the problem of saying evil. Let's look at the nature and origin of evil to maybe make it even more explicit what I mean by this problem of saying evil. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says something else that's very helpful for us. And he's recounting his own journey from atheism to Christian theism. And Lewis says this, if a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong? And for many years, I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to the question. But then that threw me back into another difficulty. My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal. A fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too. For the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist, In other words, if the whole of reality was senseless, I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality, namely my idea of justice, was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it had no meaning. Just as if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. So, in a sense, with that analogy, that's what I mean by the problem of saying evil. We shouldn't make things too difficult here. We're after a definition of evil. Let's dial it back a notch. What do we mean by the word bad? That's bad. Don't we just mean not good? Now, stare at that for a second. It's actually pretty profound. You can't say bad or evil unless what you mean is not good, not the way it ought to be, which assumes an it and an ought. It's a moral it. And that should be obvious. Can the atheist mean anything objective by the word evil, such that by objective evil, real evil, we would mean that which is morally blameworthy at all times, for all agents." Well, not unless he also has the idea of objective good that is morally praiseworthy at all times for all agents. In order to say that God could or should or would do this, you ought to have an idea of God. And it has to stick. It has to stay there. He has to exist in order to criticize him for all these things that this square circle would and couldn't do. And so the question is, what would have to be true about the world for there to be an objective good for all times and for all agents? I'll skip this stuff about suffering because it's going to say the same thing. One of the pictures that I use, and it's a pretty simple picture, is just to look, imagine, a Nazi concentration camp and to just play a game of show me the evil. Show me the evil. The atheist might respond, what do you mean show you the evil? The whole thing is evil. And again, I remember a debate between Alan Dershowitz and Alan Keyes in which Dershowitz said something like, yeah, I know there's evil. We've seen evil, and he had in mind Nazi Germany, but we don't know good. We've seen evil, but you've never heard from God. And Keyes pretty much fell back on the same logic as C.S. Lewis gives in Mere Christianity to answer that objection. But show me the evil in this concentration camp that you would agree really is evil. OK, so what do you mean by the whole thing when you say the whole thing's evil? Do you mean the dirt? You mean the air? You mean the victims? And of course he's going to say, of course I don't mean that. Which part do you mean? Do you mean those brown shirts shoving Jews into ovens? Is that what you mean by evil? So I should get rid of ovens and gas and brown shirts shouldn't work for UPS or shouldn't have a gas? No, of course that's not what I mean. Well, what do you mean? I mean the act itself. All right, well now we're getting somewhere. But what do you mean by the act itself? What if he says, I mean destroying human life? You mean like an infant in the womb at an abortion clinic? Or do you have in mind something more like a lion taking out a gazelle? Because it seems that you don't call either of those two things evil. So where do you, the atheist, draw the line between human life and not so human life. Homo sapien life, other biological life. Because according to your view, you can draw no such lines that are moral lines. And this, in a nutshell, is the problem of saying evil. If you're not committed to a revealed, eternal, moral law, you can't say the word evil and mean anything cognitively significant beyond just, that's what I happen to prefer. Or that's what most of us have agreed on for now. That's the highest that you can shoot for. We talked about that last week. Now, for the tender-hearted and the easily impressed, such invincible logic does absolutely nothing. The more popular way to answer the problem of evil, ever since Lewis made it popular in another book called The Problem of Pain, And this is where I start to part ways with Lewis. And it's been given more sophistication by a philosopher named Alvin Plantinga, and it's called the free will defense. And briefly stated, the free will defense, I won't write it down because we're limited time here, but the free will defense runs like this. Premise one, God must create the best of all possible worlds. Premise two, the best of all possible worlds implies love, and there's sort of a hidden premise, so we can just add it in, which love implies the freedom to reject that love. So, God must create the greatest possible world, the greatest possible world implies love, and love, as we all know, implies the possibility of rejecting that love. Therefore, the free rejection of God's love is the origin and nature of evil. the free will defense, in a nutshell. Now, as a corollary of this, Plantinga also talks about something he calls trans-world depravity, and you have to, and what that basically means, you don't have to use the phrase, but you actually have to go there in your thinking, that it has to be possible, or at least highly probable, that evil has to exist in any world where God creates other personal beings capable of love. Because if the greatest possible world implies love, and love implies the possibility of rejecting that love, then in any greatest world, there has to be the high degree of probability of rejecting that love and evil existing. Three problems emerge immediately for any Christian theist. Number one, and again, why does Calvinism matter in your theology and in your apologetics? Pay attention. Here's one answer. Three problems with this idea of the free will defense. Number one, it would make God depend upon evil in order to create the best things. Did you catch that? In order for God to create the greatest possible world, it implies love, and love implies the possibility of rejecting that love. Therefore, it makes God dependent on evil to create the best things. Second problem. If that's really true about the essence of love, that it demands the possibility of rejecting that love, then God, who the Bible says is love, 1 John 4, 7, And eight, God should be more susceptible to this than anyone else. If the very essence of love demands the possibility of rejecting that love, then God, who is love, should be more susceptible than anyone else. Third, the hope of heaven becomes our own free will. And thus, there's no good answer to the question over whether or not we will ever fall away from God in the afterlife. Hence, the doctrines of divine goodness, the Trinity, and heaven are all annihilated by the free will defense, a defense that is incoherent and unnecessary to begin with. But it destroys the whole fabric of the Christian faith. As D.A. Carson observes in his book on suffering and evil, he says, if such absolute freedom is necessary, if we are to truly love God, does this mean we will no longer love God in the new heaven and the new earth, when presumably we will no longer be able to sin? Or are we to think that even there we might sin? But if God can so arrange things that in the new heaven and the new earth, we will love him wholly and truly and without failure, why could he not do so without taking the race through a fallen world? Why should it be only there in this fallen world, or only here in this fallen world, that we must have absolute freedom to be able to grow? Hopefully you're starting to get a picture that our theology determines our apologetics. And not all theological commitments are equal for the task. Arminian theology is committed to a concept of free will that begins to give a different shape, not only to the relationship between God and the creature, but in fact to the very eternal nature of God himself. Note that Arminian theology makes the freedom of the will, the free will defense, makes the freedom of the will as this indifferent ability to do or to do otherwise. You're not allowed to have any nature inclining you one way or the other. Now, we're getting into deeper stuff here, Jonathan Edwards' book on that subject. But in the free will defense, and in Arminian theology, there's assumed a concept called libertarian free will. And the idea is that you can't have any nature tending you in one direction or another, because then it's not freedom. Freedom must mean the absolute blank slate at every point, where you come to each decision completely neutral, completely indifferent, not tending or inclining one way or another. And that's the essence of this greatest possible world. So Arminian theology makes the freedom of the will to be the grand necessity in God's relationship to the creature. This affects the answer we give to the problem of evil in a similar way to how it affects the way we do church to make it more palatable to the seeker in the suburbs. In fact, what we have here is a desperate modern attempt to get God off the hook. which is a task which God himself has never given to us. The end of Job and Romans 9 is the way to answer the problem of evil. Who are you, O man? Where were you, O man? End of story. The Bible has an answer to the problem of evil. And it's not God's problem, and it's not the believer's problem, it's the unbeliever's problem. I've got a section here from a guy named David Horton, a book he wrote called The Portable Seminary, and it's actually a pretty good picture of what evil must be, and it'll just set us up for next week. He says, evil is not a substance, but a corruption of the good substances God made. Evil is like rust to a car or rot to a tree. It is a lack in good things, but is not a thing in itself. Evil is like a wound in an arm or moth holes in a garment. It exists only in another, but not in itself. It is important to note that a privation is not the same as absence. Sight is absent in a stone as well as in a blind person. But the absence of sight in a stone is not a privation, since the stone by nature ought not to see. It is not deprived of sight, as is the blind man. Evil, then, is a deprivation, not a mere negation of some good that ought to be there. And if we have limited time, which we do, and if that's not helpful for you at first, consider the simple act of turning a light switch off. When we turn off the light in a room, did we create darkness? Did we create darkness? Did we speak it into existence? And the answer is, of course not. And so you might be asking, well, is this kind of something like, is this what you're getting at? Is this what God did? God turned the lights off? And the reason this is coming up is because of another phrase that's used in this modern attempt to get God off the hook. And that is, God is not the author of evil. God is not the author of evil. Okay, now I'm going to give you a simple response to that, which is true, and then we're going to get deeper starting next week. But my simple response is, where did you see that in Scripture? If what you mean is that God did not create anything evil, or that God did not commit evil, I agree totally. God only does good things. God only makes good things. But if you mean that God cannot cause evil, You just said, no I didn't. I said create or commit, which would have him doing something bad. But God, and in fact we do it all the time with our kids, we cause sin sinlessly. Now, we don't, in fact, pull that off because we're sinners. But what I want to suggest is that God causes all things. The Bible is very clear about that. Isaiah 45, 7. I create light and darkness, well-being and calamity. I, the Lord, do all these things. Amos 3, 6. Does a disaster come upon a city unless the Lord caused it? And in Romans 8, 20. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope. Talking about the devil? The devil made the fall happen in hope? No, of course not. Was it talking about Adam? It says, not willingly. Didn't Adam act by his will? Yes. Didn't Lucifer fall willingly? Yes. But now Paul is treating the biggest question. Whose idea was the whole thing? Who caused the whole thing? And so one of the things we're going to have to tackle is, can God cause all things, good and evil, without committing evil, without creating evil? And what would be the significance if he created, that would be bad because he's doing something bad. But if he's causing something and there's bad happening inside that, is that really a distinction without a difference? Come on, Matt, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. Well, then you have to come back next week to hear me answer that question. There's a biblical answer. Suspense. Go. Question and answers. Well, answers will be attempted. Yes? Heaven. But the first one was goodness. God's goodness is then dependent on something in creation. Our hope in heaven. Yeah. Good. I've been not doing that.