Fear and Trembling

I have made much of the argument for Christianity’s truth based on the moral argument .  The basic idea of the moral argument is that atheism has no basing for objective morality; there is no reason for an atheist to be moral given their way of thinking about the world. This form of argumentation is often miss-characterized by those in the vocal atheist movement.  They say we are accusing them of being amoral, evil people who do not live lives that meet a high standard of right and wrong.  Some web sites ever accuse us of saying atheists eat babies because they are so immoral.  This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument.  In fact, the argument only works if most atheists are outwardly morally outstanding people.  The idea is that a morally superior atheist has no objective basis for the moral life he or she is living.  They are borrowing a set of moral absolutes from another worldview, unusually Christianity itself.  A person o...

(This is an article written for our local paper.) Much has been written about the philosophical problems the existence of evil poses for the Christian faith. The philosophical question is simple: how can God be both all-powerful and all-good while allowing evil and suffering? I am not about to try to give a comprehensive explanation for how evil came to be. God created men with the ability to sin and the ability not to sin, but I cannot reason beyond that. I do not know the “how”; I just know the “is.” I know that evil exists. I know evil is present. I know evil is real. What must exist in order for evil to be truly wrong? Does not the existence of evil itself  require a standard of good? Should I just accept evil as a part of the way the universe works? Should I accept a view of evil based on social convention, or the DNA encoded in my cells? These things vary from one person to the next, or one time to the next, but we do not find a definition of evil that changes grea...

In response to the recent shooting in Aurora, Colorado , John Stonestreet over at Breakpoint does a good job of quickly addressing the problem of evil at this post. Evil is both a problem for academic philosophers who wrestle with God’s existence and a problem for individuals who wrestle with the pain and suffering they endure.   The two groups overlap (what academic philosopher has lived a life untouched by evil), but I have little patience for the academic problem.   Many times when someone brings up a specific example of evil that he feels invalidates God’s existence, he admits that he is not personally trying to eliminate the very suffering he finds so repugnant.   It is difficult for me to respect that.   In addition, as Stonestreet points out in his article, a person who uses the problem of evil as a philosophical argument must provide a rationale for the existence of evil.   In a materialistic world, what gives a person the right to say someth...

"Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered." - R.C. Sproul “Why do bad things happen to good people” as a philosophical problem for Christianity assumes the presence of “good people.” There simply are none in the world today. Only Jesus Christ was a truly good person, and, as Sproul points out above, He volunteered for the duty. Like it or not, no one is free from sin ( Romans 5:12-21 ). Since we are not, we should suffer. As R. C. Sproul points out above and John Gerstner pointed out in “The Problem of Pleasure,” we do not deserve anything but punishment. Earthquakes, tornados, floods, tsunamis, and other natural disasters are what we deserve. [This is a brief note on one approach to the philosophical problem of natural evil. This kind of thinking does no good to persons who are wrestling with the personal problem of evil. The personal problem of evil is what you experience when you go through it yourself. Please see this ...

Evil is all around us. Some even try to use the existence of evil as an argument against God's existence . I am not about to try to give a comprehensive explanation for how evil came to be. I do not claim to be the kind of person who can mount a theodicy of any consequence. God created men with the ability to sin and the ability not to sin , but I cannot reason beyond that. I do not know the “how”; I just know the “is.” I know that evil exists. I know evil is present. I know evil is real. What must exist in order for evil and suffering to be truly wrong? Does not the existence of evil itself require a standard of good? Should I just accept evil as a part of the way the universe works? Should I accept a view of evil based on social convention, or the DNA encoded in my cells? These things vary from one person to the next, but we do not find a definition of evil that changes greatly from person to person, place to place, or time to time. We always seem to have a notion of the w...

See the interesting discussion here .

MSNBC on Matt Chandler’s cancer. (Thanks to Mark Driscoll’s Facebook post of the link.)

Much has been written about the philosophical problems the existence of evil poses for the Christian faith. The philosophical question is simple: how can God be both all-powerful and all-good while allowing evil and suffering? I have attempted an answer to this intellectual question here , but I wanted to explore the personal side of it in this post. In my own life, many things have not worked out the way I had hoped. I have been quite disappointed. I’ve had childhood illness, watched my grandmother die of colon cancer when I was about 13, been through a painful broken engagement, been through a divorce, remarried only to struggle with infertility for several years, endured a devastating car wreck that has injured me permanently, watched my mother die a long and painful death at the hands of congestive heart failure, and wrestled with personal illness in adulthood. Above all, I have faced my own sins and failures with the pain that comes from regret and remorse. But my suffering ...

R. C. Sproul does a good job of explaining what we can know about the origin of sin in “The Mystery of Iniquity” over at Ligonier’s blog. I’ve tried to tackle the issue here and here , but R. C. does a more professional job.

I have a copy of John Macarthur’s book The Truth War on the shelf at home. I was a great read. I have an mp3 disc of the messages at last’s years Ligonier conference where Macarthur spoke. In both places, he handled the ‘problem of evil’ very well. Ligonier Ministries has now posted links to Macarthur’s address . These are great links to follow.

I have grown to appreciate the apologetics ministry of Ravi Zacharias , so it should come as no surprise that I purchased and read a copy of his latest book. The short little book is titled: The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2008), and it is a winsome and effective counter-argument to Harris, Dawkins, et. al. Zacharias’ polemics are clear and convincing. His version of the moral argument for God’s existence is emotional and intellectually vital. Here is part of his response to Harris’ argument that evil and suffering prove that an all-powerful, good God cannot exist: Harris’ antagonism toward God ends up proving that he finds some things reprehensible. But he cannot explain his innate sense of right and wrong – the reality of God’s law written on his heart – because there is no logical explanation for how that intuition toward morality could develop from sheer matter and chemistry. Popularly stated, I would put it this way: * W...

A bridge in Minneapolis collapses. Nuclear weapons experimentation makes Kazakhstan home to people with awful disfigurement. A train wreck in Brazil kills eight and injures over 100. Civil war tears apart the hopes and dreams of children. Seemingly countless murders tear apart families. Evil, defined for this post as sin or injustice against another human being, is all around us. I am not about to try to give a comprehensive explanation for how evil came to be. I do not claim to be the kind of person who can mount a theodicy of any consequence. God created men with the ability to sin and the ability not to sin , but I cannot reason beyond that. I do not know the “how”; I just know the “is.” I know that evil exists. I know evil is present. I know evil is real. What must exist in order for evil and suffering to be truly wrong? Does not the existence of evil itself require a standard of good? Should I just accept evil as a part of the way the universe works? Should I accept a view o...

A good short article on morals in an atheistic world resides here . The article, by Dr. Phil Fernandes, gives a good short summary of my anti-hero: Friedrich Nietzsche. By “anti-hero,” I mean someone who I disagree with who I can nonetheless respect for his or her intellectual stance. Nietzsche is a philosopher who wrestled with the meaning of ethics in an atheist worldview. His basic conclusion was there were no transcendent ethics, and that we must create our own. He at least acknowledges the reality of a world without God and takes that view of the world to its logical conclusion. I believe that ethics are consistent and universal . God so created the universe that we have a moral sense that is a reliable guide to actions in the world . Nietzsche is also an example of ethics “thrown out the window” in the historical movements that adopted his philosophy . I pray for the day when all men will acknowledge the moral law and the Moral Lawgiver. The scary part is that none of us fo...

There is something profoundly wrong with death. I am not talking in abstract terms here; I am talking about the death of my Mother last year. My Mom was the one who I could always count on to be there for me, even when I had done wrong. She was the one who dried my tears from my eyes with a dishtowel when I cried. She was the one who brought joy to my life as a child. I was very ill when I was a kid. I had a severe case of histoplasmosis of the lungs at age one. This was not as treatable a condition then as it is now. My parents were told at one point that I had only a few months to live. I was fourteen before I really grew out of it. Mom was the one who held me in her arms when I could not get my breath and rocked me back and forth to help me breath. She made my early life special. She took me to see what corn was, how it grew on the stalk, and how it had hair that grew on the end. She showed me many things. She channeled my intelligence into productive things and always seemed to ha...

Most people who discuss the moral argument for God’s existence make a basic mistake: they form the argument based in part on the idea that everyone has a consistent idea of what morality is. That is not necessary. I don’t think the standard form of the argument, that everyone's morality is the same when they express it, makes sense. That form ignores the reality of original sin or total depravity. Briefly, total depravity is not that all people are as bad as they possibly could be. It’s the idea that all people have a nature that is prone to disobey God, and that nature effects every part of their lives. No one’s conscience is immune from this, so no one’s conscience is perfectly conformed to God’s law. But the argument doesn’t have to show that everyone’s morality is the same as they express it. The form of the moral argument I use comes from the Apostle Paul: “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself...