Pastoring, Parenting and the Answer to the Problem of Evil
One of the biggest complaints that I receive about belief in God is the problem of evil. As a pastor, I receive this complaint in two different ways. The first way is from atheists who look at all the evil in the world and posit: If God were all powerful, why is there evil in the world? Why couldn't God just prevent the evil from happening in the first place? There are two major of fallacies within the context of this line of questioning. First, an atheist has no framework for evaluating good and evil and must therefore borrow that understanding from somewhere outside his/her worldview. This is the easiest to see and there are scores of resources referencing this by both theists and atheists. (I personally recommend Frank Turek's book "Stealing from God".) Second, the atheist makes a category mistake in confusing the nature of a human being with free will with that of a toaster oven. If we look at a d...