This excerpt really needs to be read in context to be fully understood, but I’m not going to give you that. I’m just going to lay it out there, hopefully to provoke thought, and possibly to whet your appetite for this good little introduction to apologetics.
The person who sees evil in the world and concludes there is no God has got it backwards. The existence of evil does not tell us there is no God. Instead, our ability to recognize evil tells us there is a God.
So when someone says he has seen such appalling evil that he must conclude God doesn’t exist, he still has not dealt with the underlying problem—the existence of evil. The intellectually consistent answer is to admit, no matter how ironic it may sound, that because evil exists, God must exist as well.
—Joe Coffey, Smooth Stones: Bringing Down the Giant Questions of Apologetics (Cruciform Press, 2011), 64.
Cruciform Press publishes one new book each month, and offers subscriptions in print or ebook formats for a very reasonable price. Books may also be purchased individually. For more information, visit www.cruciformpress.com.
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#1 || 11·06·29··06:59 || Jared Moore
Joe is exactly right. Without the existence of God, evil becomes a relative thought that's heaped upon more relative thought. Prove that 9/11 was wrong if God doesn't exist. It's impossible to do without condoning much of the evil that has taken place throughout the history of the world. If the "majority" of humanity in a certain location gets to define evil, then there were clear moments in history when rape, murder, canibalism, slavery, adultery, etc. were morally good.