 |
Taking Every Thought Captive |
 Got Life? Our Ministry Our Beliefs Our Staff Articles What's New? Contact Us Resources Bookstore Search Links
|
The Tsunami and The Problem of Evil By Massimo Lorenzini Why death &
suffering? As Christians, we believe in a good God who is all-powerful
and all-loving. Yet, we cannot escape the reality of evil and suffering in the
world. Many people reject belief in God because they can’t imagine a world in
which God and evil both exist. It is a good thing to take evil seriously and to
find it abhorrent. It would be far more disconcerting to talk with a person who
finds no problem with the existence of evil (though a consistent atheist would
have to say so). 
Tsunami[1] Carl Wieland of Answers in Genesis
provides a helpful analysis of the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The
following comes from Wieland: Compared to seeing a plane plunge into
a skyscraper, the first amateur video shots showing a surge of brown water
overpowering the blue of a resort pool didn’t seem to rate high on the scale of
horror. But as the images kept pouring in and
the estimated death toll kept rising, into the six figures even, it became apparent
that the Asian tsunami disaster makes 9/11 seem tame by comparison. Of course, 9/11 was triggered by the
deliberate actions of people, whereas the tsunami disaster is in quite a
different category. No human action, nor any failure to act, caused this Indian
Ocean catastrophe. The killer waves were set off by a
massive undersea earthquake, apparently the result of slippage of tectonic
plates after years of pent-up strain. Some coastlines are estimated to have
moved as much as 20 meters (65 ft.). An earthquake of magnitude 9, like this
one, sounds “almost twice as bad” as a more common one of magnitude 5; but the
Richter scale is an logarithmic one. That means a “9” is really 10,000 times as
violent as a “5”. [In fact, this refers only to the wave amplitude. The energy
involved is actually a million times greater.] The giant quake shook the world
with the force of millions of Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. Sensitive
instruments were said to have picked up an effect on the earth’s rotation; the
globe was described as “ringing like a bell” afterwards. The Tsunami and the Great Flood The superquake
that set off the Asian tsunami disaster is believed to have resulted from the
sudden slippage of two tectonic plates in the earth’s crust. The most prominent
theory today concerning the mechanism of the Genesis Flood is that of
Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT). Its chief proponent is leading creationary scientist Dr. John Baumgardner.
Dr. Baumgardner, who recently retired after years of
service at Los Alamos National Laboratories, is also a world-renowned expert on
plate tectonics. He rejects the millions of years normally associated with
plate tectonics and its corollary, “continental drift”, and points to ample
scientific evidence to support the view that the movements of continents, for
instance, had to have happened relatively quickly. Watching the results of a relatively
minor slippage of two plates against each other, it’s not hard to imagine some
of the forces which would have been unleashed at the time of Noah’s Flood—CPT
has the entire ocean floor recycled in a matter of weeks. No wonder the Bible
has a special Hebrew word (mabbul, different
from the ordinary word for “flood”) which it reserves exclusively for the
Flood. This cataclysmic flood in the days of Noah that destroyed the earth is
responsible for vast amounts of sedimentary and fossil-bearing layers.
Incidentally, Korean naval architects showed that the Ark could have withstood
waves 4–5 times taller than this tsunami (only about 20 feet or 6 meters high). Natural
Evil and Human Evil Philosophers refer to the problem of
“natural evil”—people suffering and dying from things that have no apparent
link to “human evil”—or even human carelessness. So much seemingly senseless
sorrow and loss, regardless of the cause, inevitably raises the same sorts of
questions about God, death and suffering as 9/11 did. Namely, regardless of
whether people or “natural disaster” are the cause, if God is all-powerful and
loving, why does He allow it? Where was God during
the Tsunami? Right where He’s always been…on his throne in complete
control of His universe. God upholds the universe by the Word of His power and
without His upholding it, the universe would disintegrate into oblivion. Again Wieland provides some interesting
insights when he writes, “When I let go of a compressed spring and watch it
bounce in seeming randomness as it releases its stored energy, it is not
something that ‘just happens’ without the involvement of God.” Are not two sparrows sold for a copper
coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will
(Matt 10:29). “Similarly, as the tectonic plates off Sumatra slipped past
one another and released their huge amount of pent-up power, this (and the
titanic consequences for so many) was not something that just ‘happened,’
independent of God.” “But that does not mean that it was a ‘supernatural’ or
miraculous event. The sparrow falling can be described in terms of ‘natural’
laws like gravity, but God is ‘in it’ totally, completely. (As has been said
before, ‘natural law’ describes God’s ‘normative’ way of operating within this
universe. Miracles refer to his non-normative operation.)” Though it is biblical, to say God is in complete control
over all things that come to pass raises disturbing questions. Wieland again observes, “The immense unfairness of it all,
for one thing. Poor villagers, already facing enormous handicaps in their
ordinary lives, battered emotionally and physically beyond belief. Young
children, brutally torn out of their mother’s arms and suffocated by water. But
before raging at the unfairness of it all, and at God, we would do well to
“zoom out” and look at the bigger picture.” Death is all around us:
Wieland sums up the problem
saying, “So the question becomes much bigger; not just “why 9/11” or “why the
tsunami tragedy”—it becomes one of “why is there any death and suffering
at all?” And it has to be faced squarely by Christians, since we claim to have
the answers to the true meaning of life, the universe and everything.” The only way we can give a good answer, the true answer, is
by taking the Bible seriously, namely its account of creation and the entrance
of sin. The Problem of
Evil Let’s examine what has come to be known as “the problem of
evil.” The 18th century Scottish philosopher and skeptic
David Hume summarized the problem of evil by saying: “Is [God] willing to
prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” What he is arguing for is that the Christian understanding
of God is not logical, it is incoherent, and therefore cannot be true because
its premises are inconsistent with each other, given the evil in the world. The
existence of evil is incompatible with the idea of a good and omnipotent God. We can summarize the problem of evil this way:
The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantiga
calls this “the only argument against God that deserves to be taken seriously.”
The reason is because it is a serious charge of incoherence and it is a genuine
stumbling block to many people to believe in the God of the Bible. The Unbeliever and
the Problem of Evil For the unbeliever to reject belief in God and Christianity
in particular, he must be in a position to assert the reality of evil in the
world. Because if evil doesn’t exist then there’s no problem of evil. What is evil? Evil
is not a thing. As darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence or
perversion of good. So you cannot have evil without good. So the unbeliever
must define good and give an account for the existence of good. What is the
standard for measuring good? (so that evil can thus be defined or identified.) Is it whatever evokes public approval? Well then we could never call a riot that
results in complete mayhem, destruction, and murder as being evil since it had
the approval of a large crowd. We could also never call the holocaust evil. So it’s not our approval that makes something good, but rather something that is inherently good
can often evoke our approval. What if we say something is good (or evil) if it possesses
instrumental or consequential goodness (or evil)? For example, a thing is good if it achieves a
certain end, like the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Well, how would you measure happiness and how would you know
if it resulted in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people? Our
finite minds cannot compute all of the possible consequences of a given action
or trait Even more devastating to this line of reasoning is the
observation that good may be taken to be whatever promotes general happiness only if it is an established fact that
generalized happiness is itself “good.” In other words, who says it’s good to
aim for general happiness? Radical environmentalists would likely think man’s
search for happiness is the main problem in the world. One cannot have purely instrumental view of goodness that
doesn’t have any basis in intrinsic goodness. In other words, there must be a
sense of “oughtness” to something being a good goal
to shoot for. So, philosophically speaking, the problem of evil turns out
to be a problem for the unbeliever himself. In order to use the argument from
evil against the Christian worldview, he must first be able to show that his
judgments about the existence of evil are meaningful—which is precisely what
the unbeliever is unable to do. The Risk of
Freedom Someone might say, “But why did God allow for the
possibility of evil?” Apparently He understood the risks and felt they were
worth taking anyway. An analogy might help. Raising children is risky. We want
them to turn out good, but we know there’s a chance they could end up being
criminals or junkies or whatever. So what do we do? Having no children is an
option. Keeping them locked in our homes is another. But why do we avoid these
extremes? Because something in us affirms the value of having children and
letting them be their own individual to make their own choices in life should
be respected. It’s a risk we take because we desire love and joy and the
alternatives are unthinkable and cruel. So in allowing for human freedom God allowed for the
possibility of evil. But the fact that God created humans to be free moral
agents doesn’t make Him responsible for the evil acts of men and the entrance
of sin in general. God created the fact of freedom; we perform the acts of
freedom. He made evil possible; humans made evil actual. Evil came about
through the abuse of our moral freedom. Though the unbeliever is unable to give an account for the
evil in the world, the problem of evil can be resolved by the believer. The Problem of Evil
Resolved
God is never unjust or
unrighteous. Gen 18:25 – “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Was the crucifixion of Christ an evil act? Yes! Did God have
a morally sufficient reason for it? Definitely! We instinctively want to ask “Why?” when bad things happen.
Unbelievers do too. But God doesn’t always provide us with explanations this
side of eternity. The secret things belong to the
Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our
children forever, that we may do all the words of this law (Deut 29:29). We might not be able to understand God’s wise and mysterious
ways even if He told us. For as the heavens are higher than
the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your
thoughts (Isa 55:9). The Bible simply calls us to trust that God is good and has
a morally sufficient reason for the evil in the world. For we walk by faith, not by sight
(2 Cor 5:7). The unbeliever finds this intolerable for his pride,
feelings, or rationality. He refuses to trust God. He wants to be in a position
to examine and assess the reason for the evil for himself. In other words, he
wants to be God. He wants God to answer to him. He wants to trade places with
God. The problem of evil comes down to the question of whether a
person should have faith in God and His Word or rather place faith in his own
fallen, human thinking and values. It finally becomes a question of ultimate
authority within a person’s life. A person’s struggle with evil is really a
fight against his own creatureliness. And this is the continuation of the way
evil entered the world in the first place—Adam and eve refused to have faith in
God’s Word simply on His say-so.
 The problem is unchanged today. Will we trust the goodness
of God and recognize His rightful authority over us? Or, will we fall for
Satan’s deceptive challenge of God’s goodness and truthfulness? So unbelievers who refuse to trust God because they feel
they cannot resolve the problem of evil are actually part of the problem
themselves. [1] The
information about the tsunami comes from Carl Wieland,
“Waves of Sadness” online at http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/1230tsunami.asp.
Go to Part 2 God's Purpose in Permitting Evil
|
