Why does the good God in Christianity allow bad things to happen?

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), a great thinker, addressed many of the common objections to Christianity that are still heard today. Lewis once compared atheists’ arguments against God to an inmate in an asylum writing the word “darkness” over and over on the wall. Arguments against God succeed in obliterating Him as much as a madman’s obsession with the “darkness” of the sun obliterates the reality: in other words – it fails at all.

One of the most common reasons that skeptics give for rejecting God or the gospel is related to the issues of pain, evil, and suffering in the world. Having personally interviewed dozens of atheists and agnostics over the years (including recent atheist figures such as Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, Bart Ehrman, and others), I have heard this objection in many different ways. The “problem of evil” is often stated this way: If God were wise, benevolent, and powerful, the world would not be the way it is. But the world is full of violence, suffering, injustice, and disease, and often those who suffer the most are innocent victims.

The atheist’s argument is that “this world of deception, danger, and death would be different if God really existed. Either he (#1) doesn’t know how to fix it, or maybe (#2) he’s malicious and doesn’t want to fix it. Or maybe (#3) God wants to fix it but can’t.”

Consider this: if the cause is evil (#1), then God is not really wise. If (#2), then God is not entirely benevolent. If evil exists and persists because of (#3), then he is not completely omnipotent. In any case, atheism presupposes that one cannot maintain a strictly traditional view of God. Suffering must prove that God is not omniscient, omnibenevolent or omnipotent. Therefore, the skeptic says the God of the Bible must not exist.

Not so, don’t rush!

To answer objections based on the problem of evil, we must ask ourselves: “How are we humans capable of judging anything as ‘good’ or ‘bad’?” Let’s put aside the arrogance here and be honest: without an objective yardstick by which to measure, anything we say about good or bad is just bragging rights. If we remove God (the ultimate standard of good by which we measure it) from our logical framework, can we meaningfully distinguish anything as right or wrong? No.

When we say that one thing is good and another thing is bad – we are actually valuing them relative to something else. And that “something else” we measure against…is God. Deep down we understand that God is the ultimate basis of goodness, love, power, virtue, beauty, wisdom, forgiveness, holiness, etc. Every imaginable positive quality you can string together and multiply ad infinitum, and that sum of everything that is “good” is God.

When we say that Mother Teresa was “good” and Osama bin Laden was “bad,” what we are really saying is: her life and actions more closely matched any ultimate measure of good than did Bin Laden’s. Think of the contrasts: “it’s better to take care of orphans than to torture them,” or “it’s moral to feed the hungry, while it’s immoral to bet on how long it will take them to starve to death.” We know that the first statement corresponds more to a final criterion of good than the second statement. much more.

In a world without God, nothing can be beautiful. or ugly

Each of us regularly makes value judgments about morality and aesthetics. We say “that was heroic” or “that was treacherous”. We might say “this song is beautiful”, while “that electric hammer is noisy”. We can make such value judgments only because there is an ultimate, unchanging standard by which we judge. Herein lies the problem with the atheist: if there is no god, how can you legitimately praise good and condemn evil?

The answer is that you can’t—not in any legitimate, objective sense. Without God, all we are left with is a noisy room full of opinions. And in that context, why is an atheist more valid than a Christian? If this is a world without objective values, and all life arose from blind evolutionary accident, then why should we assume that atheist interpretations against God are any more coherent than a moment of a dog barking?

Without God as our point of reference, there is no good or bad – there are only “things”. The most we can point to is that “things happen”. A meaningful judgment beyond that is not possible.

Today in the article : Why Does a Good God Allow Evil Things to Happen? We reviewed useful information about the Bible and the way of Jesus. If you wish, you can view other articles of Ali Vahidi about Christianity