God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.” (Reasons, Chapter 2) Second, it is a mistake, though an understandable one, to think that if you abandon belief in God it somehow makes the problem of evil easier to handle. In fact, evil and suffering (if anything) provide evidence for God’s existence. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains: there really be any such thing as “Could horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live…. A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (…and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful…argument for the reality of God].” (Philosophers Who Believe, p. 73) Yet, all this philosophizing doesn’t really help when your heart is broken and you are hurting. It doesn’t really answer the question And the hard reality we “Why?” have to come to grips with is that God doesn’t give us the answer to that question for each experience of pain. What he does give is Jesus. Jesus came to earth to deliberately put himself on the hook of human suffering. In Jesus, God experienced the greatest depths of evil and pain. Jesus was profoundly shaken by evil and suffering. In the garden before his arrest, his soul was with sorrow to the point of death” (Mark “overwhelmed He showed all the signs of being in physical shock (Luke 22:44). He begged the Father to save him from what he was going through (Luke 22:42). On the
God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.” (Reasons, Chapter 2) Second, it is a mistake, though an understandable one, to think that if you abandon belief in God it somehow makes the problem of evil easier to handle. In fact, evil and suffering (if anything) provide evidence for God’s existence. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains: “Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live…. A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (…and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful…argument for the reality of God].” (Philosophers Who Believe, p. 73) Yet, all this philosophizing doesn’t really help when your heart is broken and you are hurting. It doesn’t really answer the question “Why?” And the hard reality we have to come to grips with is that God doesn’t give us the answer to that question for each experience of pain. What he does give is Jesus. Jesus came to earth to deliberately put himself on the hook of human suffering. In Jesus, God experienced the greatest depths of evil and pain. Jesus was profoundly shaken by evil and suffering. In the garden before his arrest, his soul was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mark He showed all the signs of being in physical shock (Luke 22:44). He begged the Father to save him from what he was going through (Luke 22:42). On the
Reasons-Big-Idea-Map.docx