God & Evil- Is there an answer to the problem of evil? -GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 11 (Part 1)

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God & Evil: How can a good God allow evil? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 11 (Part 2)

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So welcome to the Got Questions podcast. On today's episode, I have with me

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Dr. Timothy Yoder, who's an associate professor of theology at Dallas Theological Seminary.

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I'm a student there, and I've had numerous classes with Dr. Yoder. One of the most meaningful was a class called

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God and Evil, where we discuss the problem of evil, the question of why does God allow evil?

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So that's our topic for today. I think Dr. Yoder has some excellent insights on that. So Dr. Yoder, welcome to the program.

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Well, thank you, Shay. It's a pleasure to be here with you. You're right. This is a really important topic, and I'm glad to share some thoughts with you.

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So Dr. Yoder, this is something that's been debated about before Christianity began.

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Christians have been discussing it, proposing solutions for nearly 2 ,000 years. So solve it for us.

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Why does God allow evil? Well, that's a good question, and I wish I could completely solve it.

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I don't think there is a silver bullet or a magic bullet or anything like that that we can say that resolves everything all at once.

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But I do think that there are some important observations, insights, reflections that we can make and think about and reflect on that will help us to maintain our faith.

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The goal is to think about some things, identify some things that can restore or strengthen or maintain our faith in a good

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God in spite of the evil that we see. So if I were to attempt to summarize it, if God is all -powerful,

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He could prevent evil. If God is all -good, He would want to prevent evil. So if the

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Bible teaches that God is all -powerful and all -good, why is there evil? I think that's probably about as simple a summary as you can get.

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So what are some of the solutions that you've heard over the years that attempt to address this, and which do you think are the strongest and why?

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Okay, very good, very good. So you're actually almost citing word for word the great philosopher

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Epicurus, who was a Greek philosopher about 25 years ago. Not a Christian.

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He lived before the time of Christ. He was a contemporary of Aristotle. And he articulated just what you were saying about this issue.

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And his thoughts usually are paraphrased or condensed into three statements.

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God is all -good, God is all -powerful, and evil exists. And we as Christians, we believe all of those statements.

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We believe that God is good, that He is great, that He is loving and merciful and just.

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And so we believe in a good, good God. And we believe in an all -powerful God. We believe that God made everything, and He exists on His own, and He is eternal, and there's nothing higher than God.

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Anselm said, God is that in which nothing greater can be conceived. And so we believe in an all -powerful

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God. And we believe that evil exists. We live in an era of coronavirus and of cancer and of mass shootings and hurricanes and earthquakes and extreme weather and cancer and all kinds of things.

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We live in a world that has fallen. It's not the way it should be. And so we as Christians, we clearly affirm these three statements.

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God is all -good, God is all -powerful, and evil exists. And we mean, in this case, we're talking about evil in the sense of suffering.

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We will also talk about evil in the sense of sin. That's a little down the road, but the philosophers like Epicurus think of it in terms of suffering.

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But here's the rub, as we might say. Those three statements seem to be in tension with each other.

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And this goes back to your original question. If God really is all -good and all -powerful, well, why doesn't

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He just get rid of evil? And that's a really good question.

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It's a fair question. And we should welcome hard questions so that we can try to answer them.

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An Epicurus question is a fair question. Why does God allow evil in the world?

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The skeptics think that because there is evil in the world, that means that God, at least some of the skeptics, that means that God doesn't exist.

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So contemporary people like Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell, who lived in the 20th century, and Sigmund Freud, another 20th century thinker, some of these atheists believe that evil and God are mutually exclusive.

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If you've got evil in the world, then there is no God. And if we have God, then there shouldn't be any evil.

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And they think it's one or the other. You can't have, you know, and so we clearly have evil, so therefore there must not be a

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God. This is the boldest conclusion from the skeptics saying that there is no

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God. And on the basis of the problem of evil. And so this is one of the most important apologetic challenges.

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Now, you asked me if I could, you know, what can we say in response? How can we respond?

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Do we just throw up our hands and say, well, OK, I guess there is no God? No, I don't think so.

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Alvin Plantinga, who is one of the great Christian philosophers, and Shea, I know that you've read

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Plantinga. And we've talked about him in my classes. He's not an easy philosopher. You made me read it.

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I did make you read it. Yes, I did. And so I'm a meanie in that regard, that's for sure.

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But he's a good philosopher. He's very hard. And his little book, God, Freedom and Evil, is not an easy read, but it's worth the time and effort.

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But in that book, Plantinga makes a really interesting observation.

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He says, we've got these three statements, right? God is all good. God is all powerful. Evil exists.

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And the skeptics say these three don't really go together. They create this tension. But Plantinga says, what if we added a fourth statement, a fourth thought?

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And what if that fourth thought was God can use evil to bring about the good?

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And if that's true, then that really diffuses the tension, at least in the most extreme way.

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If God can use the evil to bring about his purposes, then

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God and evil are not mutually exclusive. And it takes the sting out of this really bold conclusion that there is no

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God, right? And Plantinga says this notion that God can use evil to bring about his purposes, first of all, it makes some sense because God is above all.

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And so if there's evil in the world, it's not as if God and evil are at war and they're duking it out.

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Who's going to win? No, God is over everything. And so if God can use evil to bring about his purposes, that makes sense from what we know about the nature of God.

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And you might say, OK, well, are there any examples of this? Well, there's one really important one, and it's what happened on that first Good Friday, right?

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When Jesus was crucified, that was an act of evil. It was unjust.

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It was wrong. He didn't deserve to die. He didn't deserve to be crucified. He didn't deserve to be tortured and whipped and mocked in all the ways that he was.

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It was wrong. I remember as a little boy thinking that we shouldn't call it Good Friday. We should call it Bad Friday because it was a really bad thing.

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But we call it Good Friday because this amazing blessing came from it, right?

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Salvation, atonement, these tremendous theological truths. Jesus took our sin upon himself and died for it to propitiate the

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Father so that we can be saved and that we can be reconciled to him. And so here's a classic and essential example of this truth.

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God can use bad things to bring about his purposes. And so this is at the heart of Plantinga's discussion of evil, that God can use evil.

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And so God is not without his resources. The evil isn't defeating God. In fact, God is using the evil and ultimately will defeat the evil at the judgment seat.

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Absolutely. That's very helpful. It's amazing to think of back in things in your life, in our lives, that we've experienced where there were definitely evil things that either happened to us or that we observed happening to others.

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And then later seeing the good that comes about that, we can see examples of this in action.

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Another thing that Plantinga talks about that I found especially fascinating was his explanation of why

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God allowed evil in the first place. Why did he allow it to, Adam and Eve's sin or Lucifer's sin, whichever you want to point to as the first sin.

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And correct me if I'm erring in my understanding, but one of his main points is that if God were to create truly free creatures and also creatures who are limited, they're not omniscient, they can't know the full ramifications of their decision.

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So Adam and Eve being our examples here, that truly free creatures will always eventually choose wrong.

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They can't, they're not omniscient, they don't have the holiness that God does, etc.

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So people in that situation, God could not have created a universe where there are truly free creatures who don't sin because truly free creatures will always eventually sin.

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So what do you think of that argument and how does that help us in the overall discussion?

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Well, I do think he's right. And now freedom is a big issue and controversial in Christian circles because we believe in God's providence and we believe in election and those sorts of things.

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But I think that it's very important for us as Christians to affirm that we can make choices that are up to us.

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I think that God's providence cooperates with or better, we cooperate with God's providence.

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And so the things that we choose are within the scope of his providence.

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And yet when we sin, we are to blame. And I think this is a strong biblical teaching.

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And so we are to blame, whether it's Adam and Eve or Jonah or Moses or Peter or Judas.

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I think that the reason that we as humans have freedom is a really critical thing.

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I love what Augustine, the great church father, argued in some of his works. He argued that evil is one thing that makes us truly human, that God, in deciding to make us, he made us with the ability to make choices.

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We don't have absolute freedom. We can't just do anything we want. There are limits and God, I think, constrains us.

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And yet there are things that are truly up to us. There are things that are truly up to us.

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And that's what makes us who we are. God has made us to love him. But we can only love him, we can only truly love him if it's also possible for us to hate him.

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And God wants us to believe in him, but we can only truly believe in him if we can not believe in him or blaspheme him.

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God wants us to repent, but we can only truly repent if we can also refuse to repent and so on.

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And there's a number of these things that God wants. He wants us to worship him, but we can only worship him if we can also refuse to worship him.

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And so because love and faith and repentance and worship can't be, it's not something that God can just make us do, like a puppet or an avatar on a computer program or something like that.

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No, it's something we have to, it has to come from within us. It has to be genuine. It can't be forced.

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And so Plantinga says, and I agree with him, that therefore there are some things that God can't do.

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And one of the things that God can't do is he can't make free creatures who will definitely love him.

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We have to, it has to be part of our choice. And because God gave us the ability to choose, therefore we will choose the right and we will choose the wrong.

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And evil is in the world because as Adam and Eve did, they chose the wrong.

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And we affirm their choice over and over in our lives every day. We choose the wrong. But we also, through the help and guidance of the spirit, choose what is good.

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And we believe and we repent and we have faith and we worship. And therefore we can have a relationship with God.

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This free will defense, I think, is what is the most important Christian thought about the problem of evil.

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I think it explains why evil is present in the world. And it also helps to explain what it means to be humans that God created.

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I remember when reading through Plantinga's book, I think for the second time, when it finally clicked.

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And the problem of evil has been something that I've wondered a lot about, thought a lot about, but didn't really have like a clear answer.

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I was like, it doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I was still at the point where, okay, God, I don't understand this, but I'm going to trust you.

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But reading Plantinga really helped me to get to the point that, okay, that makes sense.

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I mean, the way he explained it, again, it took me multiple times reading through it, putting together his points and all the formulas and so forth.

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But once it finally clicked, it was like, wow, that's actually really, really helpful. Now, obviously,

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Plantinga is not the first to come up with explanations throughout church history. There's been multiple theologians, philosophers explaining this.

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What are some of the other possible explanations for why God allows evil that you find to be helpful?

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Good, good. Yeah, let me mention a couple of big names in this that I think are really helpful.

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I mentioned Augustine already in his famous Confessions. If you've never read Confessions, you really need to.

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It's one of the great books in the world without qualification. It's a fascinating read, the story of his life in conversion.

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And he talks about the problem of evil quite a bit in there. C .S. Lewis, who is one of our great, great

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Christian apologists and thinkers, his book, Mere Christianity, as well as his book, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce.

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These are all great reads as well. And they have a lot in there about the problem of evil.

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I think that, so Augustine, C .S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, Don Carson, one of our contemporary theologians, has a book on the problem of evil that we read in class.

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John Stackhouse. These are some good authors as well. So the free will defense,

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I think, is very important. The free will defense helps to explain that freedom is part of the way, part of the reason that God made us is he endowed us with freedom so that we can love him and worship him and obey him.

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But that freedom means that we will use that to go wrong. Another explanation or idea, some people call them theodicies, is the greater good principle.

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And this is what we were touching on a little bit earlier. The greater good principle argues that some things are necessary in order, some evils are necessary in order to produce some goods.

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And there's a couple of classic verses that support this idea. The first is James, chapter one.

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James says, consider all joy, brothers and sisters, when you encounter trials of various kind, because the testing of your faith produces maturity, perseverance, growth.

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And so on. And this very counterintuitive idea, nobody is excited for a trial.

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Oh, I got a flat tire. Yay. No, we're not. But James says, consider it all joy.

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Why? Because through these difficulties, we grow. We grow.

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And the other great verse is at the end of the book of Genesis, Genesis 50, 20.

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The long story of Joseph, which is one of the great stories in the Bible. And Joseph, who's a man of faith who persevered through many difficult circumstances, being sold into slavery, wrongfully imprisoned, falsely accused and so on, rose to a position of authority and used it to help survive a great famine and was reconciled to his family.

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And his brothers, fearing that he would take revenge on him, came to him. Right. And Joseph said, look, what you did to me was wrong and you meant it to me as evil.

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But God meant it for good, for the saving of many lives. And so sometimes some of the evils that we experience, some of the suffering that we experience can be used to produce greater goods or other goods anyway.

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I think it's very interesting that some of the some of the virtues that we that we prize can only come through difficulty.

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A great example is is patience. Right. We all we all love people who are patient.

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We all want, you know, the key people in our life to be more patient with us. You know, I wish my wife was more patient.

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I wish my kids were more patient with my boss. I wish my, you know, fill in the blank was more patient with me. Patience is a good thing.

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But how do we get patience? Well, the King James Bible, which I grew up reading, usually says that patience is is long suffering.

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We get patience by putting up with things for a long period of time. You don't get you don't get patience on a great vacation.

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You know, when the weather is perfect and the scenery is wonderful and the food is great and you're with your loved ones and everything is going, you know, that that flies by.

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Right now, you get patience when you get stuck in an airport waiting to go someplace and delay, delay, delay.

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Or you get patience putting up with a boring job for months or years. You get patience, you know, listening to long lectures and seminary or other sorts of things.

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Right. That's how you get patience. Right. Patience come. Patience is a good thing. Even God has patience.

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As Second Peter tells us, patience comes through dealing with difficult circumstances.

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I think we could say the same. Courage and maturity of all kind come through difficult kinds of things.

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And so many times God uses difficulties to bring about important, positive blessings.

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Excellent. I mean, what you said about patience especially rings with me.

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And that there's the old saying that don't pray for patience because typically

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God does that by bringing about difficult circumstances in which you have to be patient. So I don't think that's always true.

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I've learned patience, thankfully, many times through observing other people going through trials. But it's true that the evil that we see in the world, the things that we experience that we didn't want often have a powerful impact on us and teaching us things that we could really learn no other way.

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So if we were to summarize part one of this problem of evil discussion is that God ultimately allowed evil because in order to have truly free creatures, there had to be the possibility of evil.

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And that truly free creatures will always eventually choose wrongly. And that why does

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God continue to allow evil? It's for his purposes that God uses the evil to accomplish his will, to bring about growth in his people, to point people to the better life we'll experience in heaven and so many other reasons.

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But God uses evil to bring about a greater good that would not be possible were it not for evil.

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Is that a fairly accurate summary of our discussion so far? That's great.

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You nailed it. Yep. I think that's good. Okay, so this concludes part one of the discussion.

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In part two, we're going to discuss the problem of evil from a more practical standpoint. So tune into that episode, which will be releasing soon.

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So I'm here with Dr. Timothy Yoder. Got questions? Bible has answers.