Crash Course in Presuppositional Apologetics: Problem of Evil

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Hey, it's John again from RoarNoMore .com. Welcome back to a crash course in presuppositional apologetics.

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This is our last video, and this is about the problem of evil. Charges often brought up that God can't be good and powerful if evil exists, and what

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I want to show you is that that is actually not the case. So here we have

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God is good, we have

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God is powerful, and yet we have evil existing.

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And here's a question. How do these things coincide? If God is good, he has the power to get rid of evil, why doesn't he?

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Isn't that a contradiction? Well, I want to point out to you something very simple that will resolve the logical contradiction, and there's a fourth step here, and that resolution is extremely simple.

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God has what we call a sufficient reason for evil to exist.

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So God has sufficient reason. Now, atheists don't like that because they will want to press you on what is this sufficient reason you're talking about, and the answer is we don't know.

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Secret things belong to God. We do know that trials bring about maturity and perseverance, and that God does have a sufficient reason.

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For the Christian, at least, we know that all things work together for good to those who are called by God according to his purpose.

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But there's another assumption hidden in the argument that an atheist will give, and that is that man is good, and we know biblically man is not good.

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Man is deserving of eternal punishment, and so anyone who doesn't get that punishment or who's not in hell right now is actually experiencing

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God's mercy. And so when someone says, if God is so good, why is there evil in the world, and why do good things happen to bad things happen to good people?

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You say, what good people? Now, another thing to realize here is there's a second presupposition, and that presupposition is that evil exists.

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To assume evil exists assumes that good exists. To assume good exists means there's a moral law, and to assume good exists means a moral law -giver.

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If there is no moral law -giver, there's no evil. So to even say that evil exists means you believe in God.

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You're relying on him. That's an underlying presupposition. That's why atheism presupposes theism.

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Now, in order to reason with an unbeliever, we must bring out these two presuppositions and show them why, logically, there is no problem of evil.

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Emotionally, there may be. Someone loses a loved one. It's hard for them. But there's a third thing to bring out here.

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What comfort can a non -believer give to someone who's experienced a great tragedy?

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They can't. Only the believer can, because we know the King of Kings, who came into this world, died on a cross, can basically empathize with all our infirmities and weaknesses, as Heber says, because he experienced them himself.

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We have hope to get. We have an afterlife. We have a good God to rely on. All the non -believer has is the universe.

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Heaven above us. It's easy to imagine, if you try, as the words to a John Lennon song go.

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And so, those three things. Number one, to assume that evil exists means you have to assume that God exists, so therefore atheism presupposes theism.

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Number two, to assume that there are good people means you're not doing an appropriate internal critique of Christianity, because we don't assume that.

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And if you're going to be rational, you need to be doing an appropriate internal critique, or else you're not, you're really not being a fair -minded person.

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If you're trying to judge Christianity based on the merits of atheism, Christians don't do that. Atheists, unfortunately, do, sometimes.

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And three, bring out the emotional components, that atheism cannot account for having comfort in the death of a loved one, or some kind of tragedy.