Why I Am a Christian: The Problem of Evil

BY R. SCOTT CLARK | Only the Judeo-Christian tradition has faced evil squarely and called it what it is. What does the Bible say about the problem of evil?

Image from Wikimedia Commons: “‘Selection’ of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, around May 1944. Jews were sent either to work or to the gas chamber. The photograph is part of the collection known as the Auschwitz Album. For more images, see Category:Auschwitz Album at Wikimedia Commons.

One of the objections that I heard and believed as a non-Christian was the objection from evil: A truly good and just God would not permit evil. The God of the Christians permits evil. Ergo, he is neither good nor just. The first (major) premise is to be doubted. The middle (minor) premise is to be qualified and the conclusion rejected.

Some Christians have tried and failed to satisfactorily explain the problem of evil.

There is evil in the world. It is a problem for Christians, and some Christian accounts of the problem are unsatisfactory. For example, the Christian neo-Platonic answer—evil is the privation of good; God is all good; therefore, evil has nothing to do with God—is unsatisfactory. It requires us to believe in a sort of scale of being between the creature and the Creator. There are two great problems with this approach…