An Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics 7 (Tactics in Apologetics, & The Problem of Evil 1)

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Paul’s Speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17

We started on the Transcendental Argument last week, and we only did the first, I think, three pages. We went over all those self-refuting statements, which was kind of fun. We're going to start today with performing an internal critique.

And actually what I'd like to do is, if everyone has their Bibles, I'd like to turn to Acts.

17.

I'd like to read this. If you recall, Paul and Silas went to Thessalonica, then Berea. He's on his missionary journey, right? And in Athens, he's open air preaching, or at least that's what the context looks like.

He's proclaiming God in the public square. Where we're going to pick up the story is in verse 25. There's some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers that hear him proclaiming this new religion, new fad. And that's kind of what they were into there, was talking about philosophy.

And they want to hear this new thing, because it's something, it's a curiosity. And they invite him to come to where all the philosophers congregate on Mars Hill and in the Areopagus. And this is what Paul says to them when he's brought up there.

Verse 22. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, to an unknown God.

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind, life and breath and everything.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined a lot of periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.

Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we have and move and have our being, as even some of your poets have said. For we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.

The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, but others said, We will hear you again about this. So Paul went out from their midst, and some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius and Areopagite, and a woman named Diamaris, and others with them.

So this is Paul speaking to not a Jewish audience, but a Greek audience. And from the get-go we see that they're Stoics and they're Epicureans. That's the types of philosophies that these two groups subscribe to.

And if you go to your handout, I believe it's on the fourth page, where it says Performing an Internal Critique, I'm just going to read the first paragraph there, and then we're going to get into this a little bit more.

We're going to talk about what it means to be Epicurean, what it means to be Stoic, and why understanding that is very significant to what's going on here. Performing an internal critique of another person's worldview is exactly what Paul did in Acts 17.

Paul's mission was to present the gospel of Jesus Christ in such a way that the Epicureans, which are Adamic materialists, and Stoics, who are materialist pantheists, would repent. He starts with presenting a belief that they had in common, that an unknown God existed and possessed the attributes of sovereignty and self-sufficiency.

He next uses the resurrection as authentication that God will judge the world. It was at this point that Paul was cut off from finishing his presentation of the person of Christ, but not without gaining followers.

To be logically consistent, the Greek philosophers should not have had a problem with a man being raised from the dead if truly God is sovereign. However, in reality, they relied on God for their life, movement, and existence.

They did not believe that God could take human form or be resurrected physically. This was a contradiction, and Paul capitalized on it. You have two groups, Epicureans and you have Stoics. The Epicureans are similar to today's Darwinian materialists, people that believe all there is is a material world.

And today we have versions of these. These are the precursors, but we have people just like this who advocate Darwinian evolution and materialism. And they tend to dominate philosophy departments and all sorts of societal institutions.

So this is actually really relatable to the situation we have today. Now the other group we have here are the Stoics. They are also materialists, but they don't believe in the particulars like the Epicureans.

Did.

The particulars being, this chair is a particular, molecules are particulars, I'm a particular. But they're kind of unrelated to each other. They're just things. The second group here believe that there was this overarching kind of plan.

Not that it was necessarily the God of Christianity or anything, but that there was something that held all these things together. And it was a sort of pantheism that everything is God, everything is connected, I am the chair, the chair is me.

And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago that the main problem with most worldviews is they can't figure out how to reconcile unity and diversity. We have unity in that there's something that connects us, but at the same time there's something different about us.

I am separated from the chair, but yet at the same time there is a relationship between me and the chair. I can see the chair, I'm experiencing the chair when I sit in it. And philosophies really have a hard time making sense of that.

And so you see here, you have on one side the materialists that are just focused on the particulars, on one side the materialists that are just focused on the overarching pantheistic connection. And they had one thing in common though, as their poets said, and Paul used that to his advantage, they believe, just to make sure, they had this statue to the unknown God, this.

Idol.

Now, the idols might have represented different things to these different camps of philosophy. They could have represented principles to the Epicureans, they could have represented actual physical realities to the other group.

But they both believe that in some sense there had to be something holding everything together. And so they went back and they tried to rely on their polytheistic past to do that. And Paul notices there's a statue there that says, to an unknown God, and he is going to proclaim to them who this God is.

Remember, everyone knows God, Paul's starting with that assumption, they actually do know the God of Christianity, though they suppress that. And he's going to use that to his advantage, he's going to show that, yes, you do know God, and I'm going to describe to you a little more about his character.

Now, there are some things they already knew, their poets said, in him we have our life, we have our movement, we have our being. In other words, we're relying on him, he is self-sufficient, we are contingent on him for our own existence.

Now, for the Epicureans, this could have been something that was a reality that existed in the material world, we have to live and eat and breathe. For the Stoics, we have to have a reference point to go back to, some kind of a divine principle that holds us all together.

But for both of them, they both realize we need something, and that's just the programming that God's given to all of us. And so, understanding sort of who these philosophical groups are helps us to gain a better understanding of what exactly Paul's doing here.

He's entering their worldview, what they have in common, and really what all humans have in common, which is that we all know God exists, we all know certain attributes of him, as Romans 1 says, his divine power, nature, and we can enter that worldview, find out where the contradiction lies, and then press that.

And he finds the contradiction with the fact that they do not believe that a man can be resurrected from the dead. They were also affected by a dualism of that time period. The materialists believe that, especially I guess represented in the Epicureans, that all that existed was the material world, and having a resurrection just doesn't make sense with that, doesn't comport.

The Stoics would have been a little different. They would have believed in divine principles and spiritual realities, but at the same time, they were so affected by those spiritual realities that they emphasized them to the point of demeaning the physical.

So having God enter into a physical body was demeaning to God, it doesn't even make sense. That's not who God is. God is a principle. God is a spiritual reality, in a sense, a mystical thing. And having him being raised from the dead doesn't make any sense to them.

At the same time, though, they have to believe in a principle that, what, is sovereign, that we rely on, that has created the world in some way. So this is a very powerful being. So Paul's point is that if such a being exists, it's not a problem for him to raise a man from the dead.

And notice, they don't accept that. But why should they have a problem with that if they actually do believe in a sovereign God who is all-powerful? So that's really the problem. He's not using the resurrection to prove Christ's deity and say, because Christ has been raised from the dead, therefore, you should repent of your sins because he exists.

It's not about his existence. It's about repentance, the fact that God is sovereign over death, that he didn't just create the world and then stand back, that he is still involved in the world, that he still cares about right and wrong, and that's evidenced by the fact that he sent his son into the world to pay for the sins of the world and to be risen from the dead.

So that's why he brings up the resurrection. A lot of times people look at this and say, that's why we need to give evidence for the resurrection, and that's not the case. That's not how Paul is using it here.

He starts out with the fact that no, you guys do believe in God and you know certain things about him, and then he moves to the resurrection being evidence for judgment, not for existence. So that is Acts 17 in a nutshell.

We could go through verse by verse and look at a number of things, and I think that would be great, but just for the sake of time, I'd like to move on. The next point, in a way, this is also what Christ did numerous times.

The woman at the well and the rich young rulers are good examples of this. Christ uses their conscience, what they know to be wrong, in order to convict them of their.

Christ’s Use of Conscience to Expose Sin

Sin.

He's pointing out a logical inconsistency in their lifestyle. We know this because of the way the master stuff and the way that we do evangelism here at Grace Bible Church, but this is also presuppositional apologetics in a way, because we are starting out with the assumption that man knows certain things, and we're especially assuming that he has a moral conscience.

He knows what's right to do, and he doesn't really do it. And so when Christ talks to the woman at the well, she is in adulterous relationships,.

Right?

And Christ uses that to point out her sin and to convict her of that sin and to offer repentance. What was she seeking, though? Ultimately, Christ knew what her ultimate goal was. She wanted living water.

She wanted the spiritual satisfaction that could only be found in Christ. And what Christ does is he brings her to the place of repentance. And she goes out, witnesses to everyone, and of course, you have a harvest there.

The rich young ruler responded in the opposite way. He comes to Christ, right? And they talk about the greatest commandment, and the rich young ruler is not fulfilling the greatest commandment because he is idolizing his riches.

He values his material possessions over Christ and the kingdom of God. And Christ points this out to him. Now he reacts in the opposite way, right? He does not repent of his sins, though that offer, even though it's not explicitly in the text made, it is available to him.

I'm sure he would have known Christ's message. And really what Christ is doing here is a presuppositional way of approaching the unbeliever, understanding that they already have a conscience. They already know God.

They already are under judgment. And he's going to use that to his advantage to point out the contradiction in their life, that what they know they're not practicing. So Acts 17, we have an example of Paul talking to a Greek audience, and then we have Christ's example in the scripture.

Now what we will never see in the scripture, at least I haven't seen it, someone will point it out if they can, I've never seen this though, is an apostle, or Christ, or a prophet, or any figure that's authoritative using evidence, evidence alone I should say, interpreted through the mind frame of humans to prove that God exists or that God should be worshipped.

I've never seen that. Like I said, one of the examples people try to give is Acts 17, but if you really read the context, that's not what's happening there. So the Bible is very much on board with this.

In fact, that's why we're doing it this way, because we have this method from the scripture. So we're still on the transcendental argument. We're going to get to some practical things here. The apologetic tactics.

There's pages and pages after this of just different worldviews and basic questions you can ask of those worldviews. Remember we went over a bunch of self-refuting statements last week, how worldviews end up contradicting themselves.

And I'm convinced that every worldview ultimately ends up doing that, apart from Christianity, the ultimately having a fallacy somewhere. Now when we're talking to someone in the world who subscribes to a worldview other than our own, and we want to be humble first of all, we don't want to just break them over the head of you're being inconsistent and you're stupid or you're a fool, but we do want to be honest with them, right?

We want to be like Christ was. We want to be wise. We want to be innocent at the same time. So starting out, the best thing to do, as far as tactics are concerned, I think is to ask questions. Get people to come out with what they actually believe.

And Greg Bonson always said that the beautiful thing about this is in getting them to just talk, you give them the rope to hang themselves. Normally, you don't really actually have to do anything if you just know how to ask good questions.

Actually, I could probably take one of the examples here. Atheism would be a good one, that's the first one. How do you justify universal, immaterial, unchanging laws in your version of the universe? That's a good question to ask them.

How do we have laws that are immaterial yet you claim to be a materialist? How do you have laws that are unchanging when the universe is always changing in your worldview? And the atheist can't answer this.

In fact, we talked to an atheist and we went over this. This was the first question I asked him was, how can you justify in an atheist world something that's immaterial? He didn't really want to go down that road.

In fact, I remember when we talked about the laws of logic, I said, are the laws of logic something that is material or immaterial? And he couldn't answer the question. He didn't want to answer the question.

He just said, well, there's people that disagree about that, and there's good philosophers on both sides of that. I want to ask him what he believed, though. And it seemed like no matter what question I asked, he would say, well, I don't really know for certain, but your God can't be true.

He would just try to go back to, well, your Bible, your God is cruel. Ultimately, I think that was his main gripe was that there's a God in the Old Testament that we believe in who murdered people and did all sorts of evil atrocities, therefore he can't exist.

And I tried to point out to him, your problem is not a logical one. Your problem is more of an emotional one. You don't find that kind of a God desirable or fitting for worship. He was judging God. He was doing exactly what Romans says you shouldn't.

So the first thing we should do is ask questions. And in doing that, what we're hoping is that the Holy Spirit will work to such a point that the nonbeliever sees the contradiction in his worldview, see that that's actually not really what he believes ultimately, and will repent based on that, will give God the glory.

And that's one of the things I told him was that the difference between you and me is that I don't actually have a big problem with your moral system. It seems pretty good. You don't want bad things to happen.

I don't want bad things to happen. There might be some little differences here and there because his conscience is here, but it's pretty similar. But the difference is he doesn't give God the glory for that moral standard, whereas in the Christian worldview, we understand that that came from God and we give God the credit.

So ask questions. And to be honest with you, the only way to get good at asking questions is to do it. The more you do it, the more you think through what you want to say first, think through what this person is actually believing, and try to ask a pointed question.

And we're going to go over a couple of those. And in doing that, you can point out contradictions and fallacies as you see them come along. We talked about the self-refuting statements, right? Those are some major contradictions in the person's worldview.

So if you see someone make the statement like that, point it out. And then bring worldviews to their ultimate conclusions. Francis Schaeffer was excellent at doing this. Let's start with a worldview like atheism and then see what that does with morality.

Very simple example, Stalin and all the evil dictators, Pol Pot. These people didn't come out of nowhere, right? They have a moral system that comported with the actions that they did. And so when you're talking to an atheist, you can take the roof off his worldview, so to speak.

See what's really in there. If we started with what you say is true, let's see what conclusion we can draw from that. Let's see how far this road takes us. And it'll eventually take them to a place that they also find undesirable.

They don't want those kinds of things. We got into a discussion with the atheist about Hitler. And he thought Hitler was this evangelical Christian, basically. And that he banned origin of species in Germany and all.

And fortunately, I'm glad I read Mein Kampf last year, because I was able to say, have you read it? And he hadn't. So no one has to read Mein Kampf. I'm not telling you to do that. It's really a drag.

But what he was attempting to do there was to say that his worldview did not lead to what Hitler did. His worldview did not lead to what Stalin did. These things are independent of the atheistic worldview.

And I tried to point out that that's not the case, that the principles that he advocates will lead directly to those things. So that's just one example. So bring worldviews to their ultimate conclusions.

Questions for Atheists, Mystics, Hindus, and Mormons

Now I want to go through a couple examples of good questions to ask, different worldviews. We already covered some of the atheist stuff. You can read that. Let's see, we've gone through empiricism and moral relativism.

Let's start at some of the mystic worldviews down here. If your worldview is beyond rational and human experience, how do you know about it? Unfortunately, I hate to say it, there's certain branches of Christianity that would fall in the mysticism camp.

This isn't just Eastern philosophy. I would say the hyper-charismatics, charismaniacs, whatever we're calling them, the people that put their emotions above the scripture. The scripture's not really important compared to how they feel.

The same critique would be leveled at them. If it's beyond rationality and human experience, how do you know about it? They start talking about this experience they have, that you can't describe it, it's just so out there that no human in the material world can really understand it.

Then how do you know about it? How are you describing it to me? Is not anything you try to tell me about your worldview based on rationality and your human.

Experience?

Right?

We have to rely on experience, our rational human experience. To claim that you need an irrational experience is not to be rational. How do you know your worldview is true? This goes back to the whole, we can't really know things.

Where did the universe come from? Actually, that's a good question to ask mystic worldviews because they end up being so mystical sometimes, especially in Hinduism, and actually we're going to get to that a little later, but they end up being so vague, it's like a muddy pond.

They try to rush from thing to thing without having any absolutes, and try to get them on a direct statement. Well, we all know it had to start somewhere, so where did it start? Hinduism, here's another one.

Hindus believe that all is one, and Brahman, which is God, is everything. Since it does not appear that way to us, they say that Brahman is beyond our experience and rationality, and all that we experience is illusion.

So if everything is illusory, then I have no reason to believe that illusion, right? If, as you claim, God is not personal, is your holy book, the Baha God Gita, a personal revelation from God, and if not, why should anyone believe it?

If any distinctions between you and a truck are illusory, why do you look both ways before you cross the street? If all is one and there are no distinctions, am I not in nirvana already? That's probably the most devastating thing you can ask them.

They believe that we need to get to the state of nirvana, where there's really no existence, where everyone is kind of one with the universe, you lose yourself. Anyone seen Star Wars? That's exactly what's in Star Wars, right?

That last scene in, I think, The New Hope, where Luke's going through the Death Star and what happens? He starts to hear a voice, and where's that voice coming from? Coming from a man that's dead, Obi-Wan Kenobi, but where is he really?

He's part of the universe, and he's guiding Luke in this quest, so the Star Wars is completely based on this, but if all is one, how come I'm not there already? What they'll say is that you are there already, or someone will say that at least, but it's just an illusion.

This whole material world's an illusion, and of course, then you can go back to pressing them about, well, if it's illusory, then why do I have any reason to believe what you're.

Saying?

What you're saying could be illusory. So, go ahead.

I actually have a friend who's Hindu, and he's a friend of mine, and I haven't been working with him lately, so I haven't had a chance to speak to him anymore, but I was thinking that someone had discussed this in my head, and I was like, well, if you believe in reincarnation and you're coming back, who's keeping score as to how you're behaving now, or how do you know when you've actually arrived and you can stop being reincarnated, you know?

Yeah.

Who's keeping track of this stuff?

There's actually another one I heard. When you started out your existence, essentially, when you started out as whatever you were, then you had no bad karma, right? Because you're a blank slate. You haven't done anything bad to create bad karma.

So if you started out and you have good karma, then you should be one with the universe already, because that's the ultimate goal. Why are you here? Now, I don't know why that's not asked a lot, but that's a good question to ask them.

You know, what are you doing here, then? Bad karma came in somewhere because you're a human being that has arthritis and all these different problems, or whatever it may be. I mean, for humans, you can point out something that's wrong.

You had bad karma. Where did that come from if you started out good? And how am I guaranteed if I follow your system and get good karma that I'm going to stay that way, because apparently it didn't work for you?

You can look at these later on. I want to jump a couple. Let's get to Mormonism. These are the ones that people usually say are tricky. In one sense, I think they are. In another sense, I think they're not, because you don't have to get really philosophical with these people.

Normally, you can just use the scriptures and reason with them from the scriptures, because they all tend to put some authority. They already say they're kind of like witnessing to Jews, right? To Jews, a stumbling block.

To Greeks, foolishness. That's what the gospel is. So when we talk to someone like a Mormon or JW, they have some level of authority in the scriptures, so it's like witnessing to a Jew. The gospel is a stumbling block to them, but they still have a source of authority to go back to that you can also go back to.

And that's where I would press them, especially with a JW. You press them on their translation. Press them on their interpretation of the scriptures. Try to show them that the scriptures are the best interpreted, or the only way to interpret them, I should say, is the way that you interpret them, the grammatical historical way.

So, here's a couple questions you can ask to Mormons. What is the manuscript evidence for the multitude of discrepancies between the Mormon Bible, which teaches, for instance, that Satan offered to redeem mankind, and that Adam was baptized in immersion, and that a prophet named Joseph Smith would appear, and the Christian Bible?

Because they claim the Bible is an authority, but there's discrepancies. There's a contradiction. Because the Book of Mormon contradicts the Bible, but they say both of them are on even playing field.

They're both accurate. So, try to press them at that. What is your answer to the teaching in Revelation 22, verse 18, that anyone who adds or takes away from the Bible will be dealt with by plagues and banishment?

How do we know that the Mormon version of the Bible is true? What evidence that the original language of the Book of Mormon, Reformed Egyptian, ever existed? This is actually a funny one, because they actually, Joseph Smith supposedly had these hieroglyphs that he translated spiritually.

And later on, I don't know where he got them. Later on, though, we still have hieroglyphs, and real Egyptian archaeologists translated them, and they mean nothing close to what Joseph Smith meant. Not even a resemblance.

So, he didn't actually know how to read Egyptian. Now, the Mormon church has tried to cover this up and say, well, there's a spiritual meaning there that we can't see. But it sounds weak. It really does.

So, a Mormon who tries to use that or whatever, why did your prophet, just keep asking questions, why did your prophet have to go to a spiritual reality that's not there? When he said that he's interpreting the hieroglyphs, and just see what they say.

What true prophet of God has been convicted of glass-looking, a con of placing a magic stone in a hat, placing one's face in the hat, and by that means, locating hidden treasure in Bainbridge, New York, on March 20th, 1826, as Joseph Smith was?

It sounds like just ridiculous stuff. That's what he did, though. It's a method of trying to find this revelation that he used. That's another question you can ask. I'm not saying that all of these are necessarily going to make the person see the logical inconsistency, but a lot of these are just throwing out different questions, good questions to ask them, get them to talk, and they're going to realize it eventually.

What you ultimately want to come back to with a Mormon is that you say the scriptures are true, but a Mormon can't be if that's the case.

It's funny you touched on Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, because we had a long discussion with a family member who's a Christian, but was saying that Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses were Christians, to which I didn't believe, but I could never seem to get that across because they said they do believe in God.

Right.

So I didn't know what to say, and what would you say to a Christian that was a...

A true Christian.

Yeah.

Especially with Mitt Romney now running for president.

Yeah.

He's trying to be included as evangelical, or Glenn Beck is like the new evangelical prophet, so to speak.

Weird.

But he's definitely not an evangelical, he's a Mormon. So I guess what I would do is, in a sense this is a good thing. It's a bad thing in one way because we're being lopped in with them. It's a good thing in the way, though, that they are trying to get our label placed on.

Them.

But if they really want our label, they have to accept our source of authority. In which case, if they accept our source of authority, then they have nothing to stand on for their religion to be true.

And so, with a Mormon, they have a polytheistic system where there's many gods, and most of them don't want to say that. Our particular god of our planet, that came from Kolob, is Yahweh, but there's many different planets, and you can be a god someday.

I would probably start by just asking, do you believe that someone who doesn't accept the gospel of repentance in Jesus Christ is a Christian? See what they say to that. If they try to say the Mormons or JWs are accepting that gospel, point out that they're work-righteous systems.

All right, if you want to, you can go over some of these other questions for other world.

Views.

I need to give some credit here for all the questions. I didn't actually come up with these questions at the end here. I used some of them, but they are taken from proofthatgodexists .org, I think it's .org, which is a great website that everyone should go to.

It's the Transcendental Argument right on the front. You can send it to your atheist friends, and then once you get past the Transcendental Argument, it takes you to a main page and has good questions for other world views there and all sorts of things, so debates and lectures and all sorts of things.

So I did get, that's one of the things in my handouts that did not come from me. The next one I want to go over with, we have what, five minutes? Let's see how far we can get. I don't know if I want to do the whole problem of evil in five minutes.

We do internal critiques of other world views, right? We enter them to try to prove the logical inconsistency, show that they are not actually relying on what they say they're relying on, they're relying on the God of the Bible.

We do the same things an atheist does, right, or any kind of non-believer. They wash their hands, they drive on the right side of the road, they're afraid of cancer and all the same things we are, but what doesn't make sense is that in order to believe the preconditions of intelligibility, you have to accept the God of the Scripture.

And they don't accept that, so what we do is we enter their world view, show that they actually do accept the God of the Scripture at a basic level, because their actions say that, to show that their world view is inconsistent.

Now, atheists or other non-believers will try to enter our world view and do the same exact thing. And the most common way we hear this all the time is they try to use the problem of evil against us.

And the problem of evil goes like this. God is completely good, God is completely powerful, yet evil exists. I'll phrase it to you this way. Was 9 -11 wrong?

Yes.

If you had the power to stop the terrorists, would you have stopped them?

Yes.

So I guess you're nicer than God. That's another way to put it. There's actually three major responses that we can level for this. The first one is to assume evil, you must assume good. This is the first point.

To assume good, you must assume a moral law. To assume a moral law, you must assume a moral law giver. So this doesn't directly reconcile the paradox here, the supposed contradiction. What it does do, though, is it shows that they don't have the right to level the question against us.

If they assume that there's such a thing as evil, they have to assume that there's such a thing as good. And where are we going back to? We're going back to God. They're relying on God to disprove God.

And what did we say a couple weeks ago? All atheism presupposes theism. You have to have God in order to disprove God. And so what they're doing is they're entering our worldview, but they're keeping part of their atheism.

They're not actually doing an internal critique. When you do an internal critique of a worldview, you put on their glasses. You show the contradiction. What they're doing is they're entering our worldview and keeping their atheism with them as they enter, keeping their problems with Christianity.

Now, if they did a true internal critique, this is what they would find, which is the second point here. So number one, they can't raise the question because in order to raise the question of evil, you have to believe in God.

Number two, they're not actually doing a real internal critique because this is the Christian position. God is completely good. God is completely powerful. Evil exists, and there's a fourth step here that they leave out.