With so much evil, can there even be a God?

Evil is the one problem with which we are all well acquainted.  There is no need to prove that evil exists and that people perceive it every day.  Yet, the Christian professes to believe that God is all good and all powerful.  This leads to a problem... a problem that has led countless believers to doubt their faith, and some to abandon their faith altogether.  If God is all powerful, then he should have the power to thwart evil.  If he is good, then he should want to thwart evil.  However, since evil continues to exist, it seems that either the Christian position is simply wrong.  

To make matters worse for the believers, the secular skeptic seems to have a good answer at this point.  There simply isn’t a God.  There is no supernatural.  All we have is the natural.  The universe came about by quantum fluctuations resulting in the Big Bang.  On this speck of a planet, life arose and evolved through natural selection acting upon random genetic variations.  In the absence of a good powerful God, there is no "problem of evil."  Moreover, in such an evolutionary process, it is death and destruction that does the weeding.  In this view, death and other events that we might call “evil” weed out the weak.  For the Christian, death is unnatural and a great evil.  This is not and cannot be the case for the naturalist.  Moreover, there is no such thing as "evil" in their view, for there is no authority by which to establish evil.  What one sees as a horrific flood, another might see as a blessing of much needed water.  The death of one individual often means further resources for another.  “Evil” is simply a subjective matter of perspective.  One might not like what is happening, but to call it objectively evil is nonsensical in the naturalistic perspective.

So, it seems, both the Chrstian and the naturalist have a problem to deal with.  The Christian must face the doubt that stems from the problem of evil.  However, the alternative side must answer how they do not have a way to account for objective evil.  In the end, I believe the Christian has satisfactory answers for the problem of evil (which will be addressed in later posts), while the naturalist has devestatlingly little to offer to explain the existence of evil.

If we were to put a simple argument together regarding the existence of evil and how it relates to God, it could look something like this:

1) If God does not exist, objective "good" and "evil" do not exist.

2) Objective "good" and "evil" do exist

Therefore;

3) God must exist

This is a logically valid and sound argument, as long as points 1) and 2) are true.  In order to doubt God's existence on the grounds of morality, one must doubt one point or the other.  We are often tempted to doubt the first point because we live in a world where moral relativism reigns supreme.  What is wrong for one person isn't necessarily wrong for another.  There is no set of absolute rules that applies to everyone.  To claim otherwise is to risk being "intolerant" of other peoples' lifestyle. This makes sense in a world where there is no God, since then all morals would be relative

This doubt is easily answered.  The reason why relativism is so attractive today is because there has been a severe misuse of the objective moral value of tolerance.  Just look at the reactions towards those people who do take objective moral stances today!  They are villified, insulted and persecuted because they have been labeled "intollerant."  This does not show that this misapplied "tolerance" is an objective moral value.  What it does show is that even those who ascribe to moral relativism are not actually relativists.  They believe in absolute moral values that everyone ought to abide by.

Regarding the second point, we have already seen that naturalism as a worldview must deny the existence of good and evil (at least objectively).  While we have experiences that say there must be evil. the naturalist says we must interpret these through our understanding of evolution.  We are hard-wired genetically to call those things that work against our survival evil.  Thus we perceive such things as "good" and "evil," even though they don't really exist external to the human experience.

To defeat the doubts raised by such a position, one only needs to see that the naturalistic position here is self defeating.  It is not only our moral beliefs that are the result of evolution and social conditioning.  If naturalism is true, all our beliefs have been created this way.  Thus, when we believe we "know" something in the objective sense, we are misled.  We can only claim to "know" that which our randomly evolved genetic makeup allows us to know.  According to naturalism, numbers and mathematics cannot exist outside of us.  They were genetically useful brain waves in our struggle for survival.  We cannot even trust that math is at all "true" in some objective sense.  As such, we do not have any reason to trust our brains or moral intuition if naturalism is true.  While you may "feel" that murder is wrong, naturalism tells us that it cannot be "actually" or "objectively" wrong.  So do whatever!

In summary, whatever doubts evil might generate in our lives can never warrant our doubting the existence of God.  To do so would be illogical.  The only options we have is that evil is an illusion, or that evil is real and so is God.  Since evil is self-evidently objectively real, we can take heart to know that God exists.  Moreover, we can know that God is intimately interested in right and wrong, morality and immorality.  It is from these foundational truths that the Gospel of redemption emerges.  Jesus came to save a world doomed due to its immorality.  His righteous perfection covers those that believe in him.  These people will in turn enjoy God for eternity in his righteous kingdom.  Such a gospel is founded upon the reality of evil.  Thus, we should not be led by evil to doubt, but rather we should be led to the cross.