“Problem of Evil”

Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341.

And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Apologetics Must Be Grounded in Theology

Hey, good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Tuesday morning and I think this is only like the second time. I think Warren Smith once filled in for Rich Pierce, at least I think. I could be wrong about that.

In fact, I may have even been back in the old KPXQ days. Maybe that's when it was, I don't know. But we come to you today with no, the sonorous voice of Rich Pierce has been silenced by vacation. As you can see from the website, it says the offices are closed.

Well, they're not technically closed. I'm here, but I don't really matter because I don't answer the phone and I don't fill the orders and I don't do all that stuff. So I guess we are technically closed.

So anyway, instead, the big B who's a fan of the big D, aren't you? You are a Cowboys fan, right?

Yeah, I'm a big Cowboys fan.

Okay, well, we'll let that slide because we need all the help we can get.

God's team.

And by the way, the dividing line will self-destruct in five minutes.

The dividing line will self-destruct when the first person calls at 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. We're going to do the best we can and press on here this week in the absence of Mr. Pierce and hopefully edify you in the process.

I was listening yesterday to a Cambridge lecture delivered by William Lane Craig and you might say, oh, not William Lane Craig again. Well, what happened was I actually had someone in channel ask me this completely off-the-wall question about D .A. Carson's views.

I think it had something to do with the sun being the messiah. I didn't understand what the thing was. And what had happened was he was assuming I had finished listening to all of those Carson lectures.

And I hadn't. I have two different shuffles and I had switched between them and the Carson lectures were on one. I had been using the other one. And so to make a long story short, I went back to the other one and it had this William Lane Craig lecture on the existence of evil, which I had loaded long before I started doing the Sunday School series.

I had put all that stuff up. And so I started listening to the Carson lecture this morning while lifting, but yesterday while riding I listened to the William Lane Craig Theodicy lecture from Cambridge University.

I guess he sort of did a whole tour of the various universities in London. He gets to go to the university and he speaks at Oxford and Cambridge. I go there and I have classes with Muslim students about the Trinity or something like that.

So things are different. Anyway, I finally got a chance to listen to it. And it's a fairly lengthy lecture. And I figure if you're at Cambridge University and you're taking questions on the existence of evil and things like that, this is going to be your best stuff.

This is going to be good stuff. And I gained an insight. People go, I must really dislike William Lane Craig. No, not at all. He seems like a nice guy. I just think that given his popularity, he becomes an example of what happens when your theology is insufficient to the task of apologetics.

That's the problem. And I have said, and you've got to give me credit on this one, I have said for many, many, many years, for a long, long time, even before Algo was listening to The Dividing Line, which is about as far back as you can go, that a person who engages in apologetics cannot start there.

Your apologetic is determined by your theology. When you're told to defend something, you have to, and this just crossed my mind, and I'm sure that's not an issue, but I hope we're recording this, right?

We started cool at it. We're good on that. We've got the tape going. We've got everything going. All right. That's the one thing I go, hey, I had a great program today. No one will ever hear it again, but we had a great program today.

Anyway, when someone tells you to defend something, you have to know what you're defending. And William Lane Craig's teachings illustrate over and over and over and over and over and over again. What that means and how that impacts things.

But I can still learn things, and it was fascinating. He said something, and I was thinking about it. I said, you know, that's a really good insight. He then turned around and vitiated. He just took the insides out of everything that he had just said in the next sentence.

But the first sentence was really useful, and I know that I certainly have given a lot of thoughts since I listened to it. So I want to listen to some of those. I've also got some Steve Ray stuff, and we'll be taking your phone calls, 877 -753 -3341.

In fact, you said the dividing line will self-destruct in a certain number of minutes, and I think it was before the program it was seven minutes after. It's almost seven minutes after right now, so I figure we might as well go ahead and take our first phone call and let it all happen at once.

So hopefully the callers are queued up, and when I hit this button I'll be able to talk to Robert. Hi, Robert. How are you?

Matthew 25 and Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Readings

Good, Dr. White. I was reading a book, and in it it's cited that Matthew 25, starting at verse 31, where Jesus separates out the goats and the sheep to right the sheep that are in jail or hungry or naked and help them, evidence for salvation by works, which I knew was wrong, but I didn't know how to properly exegete the passage.

Well, how do you know that's wrong?

There are other passages, salvation by a faithful...

Okay, so then if you're aware that there are entire texts like Romans 3 and 4 that talk about salvation based upon the imputed righteousness of Christ, a person's faith in Christ and things like that, then in Matthew 25 and this discussion of Jesus, in verse 32, who is gathered before him?

The people of all the nations.

Actually it says before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. So this is a general judgment of nations based upon how they treated the people of God, in essence.

And yet even at that, the situation you're facing here is one of many texts where you ask a simple question. It clearly is not. Nowhere does the Bible base one's salvation upon such things as, well, you need to feed 477 people, you need to hand out water to this number of people.

That's never made the basis of salvation, and in fact, the only people who can make that kind of a system work are the people who minimize sin, as if somehow there's a certain number of good deeds you can do that's going to outweigh the weight of your sin or something along those lines.

But even more so than that, and we've got a... Is the mouthpiece real close to you there, Robert? Because we're getting some like wind noise in the mouthpiece a little bit.

All right.

Yeah, it's difficult to hear over that. Now it's gotten much worse. Okay. Why don't we just cut that down a little bit there, Barry? Why don't we take that down about 50 and then when I'm done with my comments, we can bring that back up so I can finish that.

Anyway, what I was trying to say is a number of these texts, this one, Matthew 7, I suppose you could think of James, but not really. I'll go back again to the same principle that we've addressed many times before, and that is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive reading of the text.

If you read these as prescriptive, as if they are laying out the things you must do, that's one way of reading these texts. That leads you to all sorts of contradiction and difficulty. Or you read them as descriptive.

That is, these are descriptions of the results of salvation. That is, those people who did the things that are described here are those in whom the Spirit of God was active and at work and they had the right motivations in doing so, so on and so forth.

The difference between prescriptive and descriptive. The problem, the easy way to determine between the two is if you simply have a biblical doctrine of sin and a biblical doctrine of the punishment of sin, and that's what all groups who end up taking these as prescriptive passages and work salvation passages end up having to throw out.

None of them can let the Bible's teaching about sin actually stand. They have to come up with another way of looking at it. They have to come up with the man having an ability to do these good works in and of himself, to continually do these good works, et cetera, et cetera.

They have to come up maybe with an idea of grace where grace becomes sort of a helper thing rather than a thing that actually accomplishes God's purposes. In some way, shape, or form, they've got to get rid of the doctrine of sin because it ends up making it impossible for anyone to have works righteousness.

And so when you look at Matthew 25, you look at Matthew 7, judgment text, wherever they may be found, the question is, is this laying out things that must be accomplished by the natural man or by just mankind as a whole to obtain salvation, or are these descriptive of what the Spirit of God does in the lives of those that he has drawn to himself?

Only one of those two interpretations can do justice to all of Scripture. I think one of the reasons that works salvation systems are more prevalent and popular than ever is due to the fact that there has been a great degradation in the view of the Bible in many churches and denominations, and therefore they don't worry about consistency or harmony.

In fact, harmonizing Scripture is considered to be a bad thing now. It's a whole lot easier just to say, well, there's contradictions, there's tensions in the text, so on and so forth. But a person who wishes to not in a surface-level way harmonize the text, where you're just ignoring what the writer is saying, we cannot ignore what's being said in Matthew chapter 25, we cannot ignore the reality of the fact that God calls us to a certain kind of life, that there is a certain kind of result of regeneration in our lives, that's what James chapter 2 is all about.

But you can preach all those texts in their context and seriously without causing them to speak in contradiction to the others. Still there, Robert?

Yes.

Okay. All right.

Thank you very much, Dr. White.

Thank you very much. Thanks for calling.

I love the Potter's Freedom, too.

Okay. Excellent. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. All righty. So somewhat similar to some of the things we'll be addressing here. Like I said, in essence, Craig's opening presentation was one we've all heard.

If you listened to his debate with Christopher Hitchens, you pretty much heard all of it. He had a little more time, so he could go a little bit more slowly, but it was pretty much the same thing. Then the questions started.

And, you know, from my perspective, again, cross-exam answering questions really brings out the reality of where you're coming from. So let's start listening to some of these questions and answers with William Lane Craig at Cambridge University on the subject of evil.

Natural Evil, Divine Purpose, and the Problem of Probability

They may often take it to God in prayer, and sometimes that prayer is answered and sometimes it's not. What would you say to an individual who's a Christian, or perhaps a person who isn't a Christian, and sees an unanswered prayer in a Christian's life?

And I guess the question is, does God answer prayer or does he not answer prayer?

Okay. Thank you. Next one. You talked about from nothing, nothing comes, and you said that it must come from a mind. I didn't quite follow how you got to that conclusion. Could you explain how you got to that?

Thank you.

Now, in case you're wondering, and I had not heard it done this way before, but they do like three questions in a row, and then let him answer instead of one at a time. I don't understand the benefit of that personally.

The audience has forgotten what the other questions were, and if I was Dr. Craig, I would too. I mean, he may be furiously scribbling them down, but you can only scribble down a portion of it. It would seem to me a whole lot better to do it one question at a time, but, you know, it's Cambridge.

What can I say?

A lot of evil can surely be put down to the evil moral decisions that some people make. So suffering is a result of human rebellion against God's will. What about natural catastrophes, however, and innocent children who die in tsunamis?

Excellent questions. Very different from one another. Later on, the questions will start merging together and be focused upon this natural evil thing. But keep in mind, listen to the responses, and see if you hear anything about God's purposes, God's decree.

There is no decree in Dr. Craig's theology. So he can't do that. So what becomes the organizing principle? What ties it all together? Why is there evil? What is God seeking to accomplish? What is it focused on?

Here is where you see the massive difference between a theocentric theology and an anthropocentric theology. A theology that is centered upon God, His purposes, and His glory, and an anthropocentric theology that is focused upon man.

That man is in the center of all of the purposes, even of God Himself. Now, again, I don't want to hear the famed offense of some people, but I cannot help, but when I hear answers like we're going to be hearing, and especially the drumbeat answer we're going to hear, we'll identify it about halfway through.

But to think of the text in the Doctrine and Covenants, the LDS scriptures, where God allegedly says that His glory is to bring about the immortality of man. I mean, there is no more anthropocentric religion than Mormonism, because God is an exalted man.

There is no difference ontologically between man and God. God, men, and angels are all the same species. And so you can't have a theocentric Mormonism because there is no Theo to have at the center. There is no God that is distinguished from the anthropos.

And yet, I think we're going to be hearing an element of that in the answers that are given.

Right.

Let me take the last question first. Everything I've said applies to so-called natural evil as well as moral evil. Namely, that God, I think, has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural disasters in the world.

And that there is no way that we can assess with any kind of confidence the probability that for some natural evil that has entered our lives, that God lacks a morally sufficient reason for permitting it.

Now, again, Dr. Craig is a philosopher, and I have to rein in my natural disdain for answering theological questions philosophically. This is a primarily philosophical lecture. I didn't even play any of it because we've all heard it before.

The pastoral element in me and the pastoral apologist in me recoils at providing merely philosophical responses that do not direct people to the Word of God. From my perspective, what is alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword?

What is it that benefits the people of God? What is it that speaks to the hearts of the people of God? What is it that brings conviction to the hearts of people? It is the Word of God. And so I want to bring that to bear, not just simply merely by quoting it or something like that, but by applying it, by bringing it out and applying it within a context and letting it have its effect.

I've seen that impact so many times. And in my experience, the impact that it has in that way is long-lasting. It's not just in the short-term impression of the university student. It is the long-term impact upon the saints of God.

I want my answers to be relevant to someone 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road, not just because they happen at this point to be in a university and they're impressed with a philosophical answer or something like that.

So I have to be careful of that point. But it does, again, it grates on me to hear Christian answers being put in the context of probabilities. It doesn't impact the probability of the existence of the nature of God or something like that.

Certainly by now, after listening to this series, you know that that's one of the major differences between the Reformed apologetic and a non-Reformed apologetic is the one aims, the non-Reformed apologetic, aims at the demonstration of the greater probability of existence of a God and the Reformed aims at the demonstration of the absolute necessity of the existence of the Christian God.

There is a vast difference between those two.

We're just not in a position to make those kind of probability judgments. And similarly, with respect to my second point, that God's goal is not human happiness but the knowledge of God, these Christian doctrines, God can use natural evils and suffering in our lives to perfect us or to bring about other ends in human history that would be conducive to maximizing the knowledge of God.

In fact, I'm...

There's the beginning of the drumbeat. Conducive to maximizing the knowledge of God. Okay. The revelation of the knowledge of God, the proclamation of His name in judgment is a very high priority for God.

That's what Romans 9 says. But Romans 9 says God does that through accomplishing His own purpose, His own decree. Not through actualizing one of many worlds wherein you have a world that is suffused with suffering.

And this suffering-suffused world leads to maximum knowledge of God. That may sound like similar things, but hopefully you're seeing they're not.

I must say that I find it not at all improbable that only in a world of free creatures, which has a great deal of natural evil in it, would the maximum number of people come freely to embrace God and His salvation.

And there is the central element, the controlling element of William Lane Craig's theology and philosophy. There it was. I hope you caught it. Free creatures. Creating a world, organizing a world, wherein the maximum number of people would freely choose to know God.

That's what God's up to. Maximum number. Now, immediately I sit back and go, Okay, if the goal is maximum number, and there's going to be a lot of people, I don't know what percentage, but a lot of people, that are not going to enter into a faith relationship, a knowing relationship with God.

They are going to continue to suppress the knowledge of God. Are you saying that this was God's best effort at getting the biggest numbers He could? Think about that for just a moment. Are we really suggesting that in the Molinist perspective, there wasn't a world where there would be more knowledge of God?

Or maybe there wasn't a world where there would be more knowledge of God and less suffering? Evidently what's being suggested is, this amount of suffering is necessary for the maximum amount. And this is the maximum amount.

This is it. God could not save anybody more than He does in this particular world. And now immediately they're saying, Well, you're saying He won't save any more than He is in this world. And I say, and that's because of His purpose.

He has a decree. He is decreed to show His mercy to the elect. Whom He chooses freely from eternity past. That's His purpose. It is not that He's trying for a maximum number, and He can just only get it up so far.

It's like maybe a great basketball player, and he's decided in the NBA finals, since that's what's going on right now, that he's going to shoot 55 from beyond the arc. In every game, he'll never go below 55%.

And he makes 53 -5, you know? Well, couldn't he go for 75? Couldn't he make all his shots from beyond the arc? Evidently there's not a world in which that would happen, or something like that. It does seem like there's some type of constraint here that keeps God from accomplishing greater numbers, which just doesn't make much sense to me.

If God prevented every natural evil that might occur, it would not at all surprise me that people would not be responsible moral agents, but would be infantile, immature children, because their actions would never have any consequences.

The fire would never burn you. If you leapt off a cliff, you would never be hurt. If you drove drunk, it wouldn't matter. Diseases wouldn't bother you. You could drink anything you want. It would lead to a kind of infantile existence that wouldn't be conducive toward the knowledge of God.

So I don't think it's at all improbable that God uses the natural evils in the world to maximize the number of people that come to know him and his salvation freely.

Now, what is the first question that crosses your mind at that point? Because the lady asked about natural evils. So what was probably the biggest natural evil, natural catastrophe in the past number of years for us?

It wasn't Katrina. It was the tsunami in Indonesia. And so just think of how many thousands of people died. And from William Lane Craig's perspective, these were people who did not know God. The vast majority of them were Muslims.

And he even identified Islam as an example of a false religion in the debate with Hitchens. So how did that increase the knowledge of God? And so immediately, that's exactly what somebody decided to ask.

Are you satisfied with that? Do you want to push a bit further?

So you argue that natural catastrophes can bring people closer to the knowledge of God, but I would argue that especially after the earthquake of Lisbon, faith has been in decline, at least in Europe.

That after the earthquake of Lisbon, what did you say?

Faith in Europe has been on decline, has been retreating rather than increasing. So at least when we look at Europe.

You're saying that the Lisbon earthquake led to an increase in atheism?

Yeah.

Yeah. See, the difficulty is here that even if that were true, which it might have been, in the short term, we don't know what the long-term consequences are. This is one of the failings in an ethical theory called utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism says you should choose that action which will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Well, the standard critique of utilitarian ethical theory is that we have no idea what will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

An action that looks wonderful in the short term could be disastrous in the long term. And an action that looks catastrophic in the short term could actually turn out to be beneficial in the long term.

And so we don't really know what the ultimate consequences of the Lisbon earthquake are. Even if they were, in the short term, negative and increased unbelief, we have no idea how the descendants of those persons have reacted in coming to faith of the gospel.

Now, is my suggestion here that God uses natural suffering and evil in the world to bring the maximum number of people to himself just some sort of airy-fairy speculation, or is there any basis for this?

Well, let me just stop right there. He goes on and gives some very interesting statistics about the growth of at least some form of Christianity or professing Christianity in some context. But I'm not really sure if that answered the question as it was asked, to be perfectly honest with you.

Again, how does... See, what really is missing in so much of what I'm listening to here that would be a part of the very fabric of my responses would be something along these lines. There is something called the wrath of God that is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

And I don't hear Dr. Craig saying that. There seems to be a real problem, from his perspective, in saying these things, in talking about the wrath of God. He wants people to be attracted to the gospel, but instead of allowing the Holy Spirit to be the one who does the attraction, instead you have this idea of, well, I'm going to sort of pull back on these things.

I'm not going to really mention these things. And that, to me, handicaps things. Well, anyway, we are coming up on our break. I've got a lot more to play here. But we'll also take your phone calls at 877 -753 -3341.

877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back.

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William Lane Craig, the Problem of Evil, and the Limits of Molinism

Welcome back to The Dividing Line. We are looking at the theology of William Lane Craig, and that's exactly what Douglas in London wants to talk about. Hello, Douglas.

Hello, Dwight.

How are you, sir?

I'm doing very well, thank you.

You wouldn't happen to have been at Cambridge, would you, when William Lane Craig was there?

No.

No, I mean...

You sound just like all the people in the audience.

Ignore my accent. My accent is a weird composite of living all over the place.

Well, it's still good. I like it.

All right. Listening to all this stuff from Dr. Craig, his debate with Mr. Hitchens, the discussion of Molnar, one wonders, what about his theology is distinctly Christian at some point?

Well, he would say, I think I can probably give almost exactly the response that he would give, and that is that he would probably make reference to C .S. Lewis, and to a number of other theologians who would identify mere Christianity as being a very simplified theology based upon the Trinity and the crucifixion and the resurrection.

And that's pretty much what everybody shares, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants. We all share that together, and everything else really is not meant to be definitional of the faith at all, especially issues regarding justification in the Gospel.

Yeah, that's because when you hear some of the points he makes, they are so incredibly vague, you can fit any so-called Christian denomination in there, even those which are distinctly liberal.

Well, there's a reason. Well, the reason's quite clear. Given that his starting point is the demonstration of the existence of a God, not necessarily the Christian God, then it makes perfect sense that he doesn't have a sufficiently defined foundation to stand upon to make any more distinct answers than the vague ones that he offers.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the major differences. When you've put the target down, as far as you've put it down, that's what happens. Okay, Douglas? It sounds like you're breaking up a little bit on us.

Yeah, my Skype headset's a bit weird.

It's picking up someone in the background there, too.

Yeah, my brother's in the room.

Well, it actually doesn't sound too bad from being all the way in London, so... Did you happen to catch any of the debates that I did there?

Yes, I did get to see you, and Sami Zatry. I didn't get to talk to, because I had a bit of a long journey, but I did get to see you and Sami Zatry debate.

Well, we don't have this nailed down yet, but the discussions right now are for a return trip in February, so hopefully next time there, and it would be at the same church that the Sami Zatry debate was at, so hopefully we'll get a chance to maybe run into you then.

Cool.

All right, thank you very much, Dr. West.

Okay, thank you for calling. God bless. Bye-bye. All right, Douglas from London. Ah, yes. It's just so easy to slip back into that accent. It's wonderful. Yeah, like I said, we haven't nailed that down yet, but we are having some conversations right now.

That...

Oh, was that... Okay, that was actually London. Okay, one of our channel rats that was calling. So, all right. But as it may, we are having some discussions about a return trip in February that would be focused there where we had the debate at Trinity Road Chapel, so let's hope and pray that that works out.

I would very much enjoy getting the chance to get back there again. I have good friends in the London area, and when I'm gone for more than a year, I start missing them a lot, so I hope we get a chance to get back there and say hello.

Let's go back now. Here is this statement. It's an odd statement about the world being suffused with suffering and how this is related, again, to this idea of the maximum number of people believing.

No problem at all thinking that only in a world suffused with natural suffering would the maximum number of people come to know God and His salvation freely, and I think that the demographics bear this out.

So I think it would be very, very difficult for the atheist to show that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural evils in the world if those morally sufficient reasons include such things as bringing people into personal relationship with Himself and increasing the knowledge of God.

I don't see how you could show that in a world with less natural disasters that there would be more knowledge of God or equal knowledge of God than there is in the actual world, and in that case the atheist is shouldering a burden of proof that he simply cannot bear.