Puzzle Piece 9: The Problem of Evil

The existence of evil and suffering in the world is one of the biggest problems many people face in trying to understand the existence of God.  It is probably the biggest roadblock to faith for many and the greatest cause of Christians losing their faith.  This Piece will delve deeply into the problem of evil and will equip you to understand the problem in a whole new light, one that actually helps to prove God’s existence, not deny it.  This Piece follows the basic outline of a speech given by Dr Norman Geisler entitled “If God Exists, Why is There Evil?” at the Saddleback Church Apologetics Conference in 2009.  Audio of the whole conference, including Dr Geisler’s talk, can be found here: http://www.saddleback.com/resources/apologetics/  and is definitely worth a listen. 

Three Approaches:

There are three basic ways in which the problem of evil can be cashed out.  For the pantheist, who claims that all is God and God is all, evil is merely an illusion, it’s not something that actually exists.  So the pantheist says that God exists but evil does not.  The atheist says that evil exists but God does not.  The theist says both evil and God exist, which is a problem; how do you reconcile an all-powerful and all-loving God with the existence of evil?  But our view is not the only one for which the problem of evil is actually a problem.  The pantheist says that evil is just an illusion and has no real basis in reality, but this seems unrealistic.  If evil is not real then why does it seem so real?  Why do death and hatred and cancer feel so real?  Where did the illusion come from, and how come we all share the same illusion?  And finally, if it is just an illusion, why can’t we simply make it go away?  To illustrate this point, Craig Hazen uses this example[1]: what if you were talking to an elderly lady and it turns out that this old lady was a Holocaust survivor.  When she was a child her whole family was taken away to a death camp and she was the only survivor.  On the pantheistic view, all the suffering she endured is but an illusion.  What should we say to her to comfort her?  Your pain isn’t real?  Pantheism simply doesn’t make sense of reality! 

The atheist faces what philosophers call the ‘grounding problem’: in what do you ground your morality?  C.S. Lewis was an atheist for many years before becoming a Christian and he identified this problem when he said, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust.  But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.  What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust?”[2]  If we have identified something as being wrong then there must be a standard of right with which we are comparing it; a Moral Law needs a Moral Law Giver!  For the theist, this is God and his standard; for the atheist there is no God and no standard (see Puzzle Pieces 7 and 8 for an in depth discussion on the existence of morality).  As we saw last time, some atheists are surprisingly frank in admitting this.  Remember Michael Ruse from the last Piece who said “Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . And any deeper meaning is illusory”. [3]  Richard Dawkins has also been quite candid at times about the morality that atheistic evolution provides.  In a debate, Dawkins’ opponent makes this statement, “There’s a large group of people who simply are uncomfortable with accepting evolution because it leads to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses have no basis in nature” to which Dawkins replies, “All I can say is, that’s just tough. We have to face up to the truth”. [4]  Both of these men acknowledge that their atheistic worldview cannot support any real morality, and without a real moral standard you cannot have evil, because evil is a failure to meet a moral standard.  STRPlace’s Brett Kunkle annually takes a group of students to the University of California Berkeley Campus to engage with atheists.  Let’s see how one of them tries to explain suffering on his worldview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uspq6_XUCFg, or the vid below.

This brings us to the theistic response.  Christian philosopher Dr Norman Geisler says that “evil cries out for God” in three ways: firstly, to explain how we know it’s evil, and we’ve dealt with that above.  Secondly, to comfort us.  Without a God there is nothing to comfort us when we are suffering.  This point was brought out brilliantly by Dr William Lane Craig when he commented on atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russel’s famous statement that, “no one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God." But, as Dr Craig points out, “What is Bertrand Russell going to say when he is kneeling at the bed of a dying child?  Tough luck?  Too bad?  That’s the way it goes?”  Only the theist can offer words of comfort to that child, because only the theist has a belief in a better future after death.  For the atheist, this world is all there is, and if you get dealt a bad hand...it’s just too bad!  As Dr Geisler says, when you are suffering it’s not the time to cry out against God, but the time to cry out for him.  And thirdly, as a solution to evil.   God is what makes a victory over evil possible (more on this later). 

The Problem of Evil for Believers:

Here’s the problem for Christians: we believe that God is all-good and opposes evil.  We believe that God is all-knowing and that he knew that evil was going to happen – the fall didn’t catch him by surprise![5]  But if you have an all-good all-powerful God then why does he permit evil?  This is our problem, and this problem actually has a number of sides.  Let’s look at them individually. 

The Nature of Evil:

This part of the problem can be summed up in the following argument:

A) God created all things

B) Evil is something, therefore

C) God created evil. 

How should the Christian respond to this?  We cannot deny the first premise; to do that would be to give up God’s omnipotence and his role in creation.  It would also imply that evil has always existed since it was never created, making it co-eternal with God.  We can’t say that evil isn’t real (premise B) because that would put us in the same place as the pantheist above.  But if we can’t deny the first two premises it looks like we must affirm the conclusion that God created evil.  The correct way to answer this challenge is to show that one of the premises is false, and this is actually a very old response.  It comes from St Augustine at the turn of the fifth century AD.  He denied the second premise and said that evil is not a thing – it is a corruption of a good thing.  God made only good things, and evil is the corruption of the good things that God has made.  In this sense, Dr Geisler says, evil is like rust in a car – first you have the car then the rust corrupts it.  But you must have the car first – you can’t have rust without it.  In the same way, God made good things, and evil corrupted these good things.  Our response to the above challenge should look like this:

A) God created only good things

B) Evil is not a thing, therefore

C) God did not create evil.

It’s important at this point to notice that we are not arguing that evil isn’t real, it is real, but it’s the absence of something, the lack of something.   Apologist Greg Koukl says it’s like the hole in a doughnut – it’s not a thing, it’s simply the place where the doughnut is not, where the doughnut is lacking.    Similarly, cold is not a thing, scientifically speaking, it’s just the absence of heat.  So too darkness – it’s the absence of light.  Darkness is real, but it’s not a thing; it’s a way of describing something that isn’t there. 

So the next question then becomes, “where did this lack come from?”  If God made only good things, where did evil come from?  It came about because God imbued his perfect creations with a characteristic that made evil possible – free will.  When God created the angels he gave them a good thing (the ability to choose) and he gave us the same power.  So evil resulted when a morally perfect being freely chose his own will over the will of his Creator – Christians call this being Satan.  Satan had no evil in his environment, no tempter, but he had free will, free choice to either obey or disobey.  As Dr Geisler says, “if you’re free to love God you are also free to hate him.  If you’re free to praise God you’re also free to blaspheme him.  Freedom is the ability to do otherwise.  And to do otherwise than good is to do evil.”  This is how a perfect being with no evil around him could choose to do evil.  There’s no way that God could have forced Satan to freely choose to do good rather than evil – that’s the nature of being free!  There’s a great example of this in the movie Bruce Almighty when Jim Carey’s character Bruce, who has been given the powers of God, asks God “How can you make someone love you if you can not effect free will?” to which God answers “Welcome to my world, son.”  God could have made robots instead of free creatures, or puppets, but they can’t choose to love.  So you can see how a perfect creature without any evil in his environment can choose to do evil.  But doesn’t this mean that God made evil possible?  Absolutely.  But who makes evil actual?  We do.  Dr Geisler goes on to offer this analogy, “Henry Ford mass produced a car.  He made a lot of evil possible...but he’s not responsible for every accident [or drunk driver].  He’s not responsible for everyone who misuses the automobile.”  God made a good thing, and we choose to use that good thing for evil purposes. 

The Persistence of Evil:

This part of the problem deals with why God hasn’t defeated evil; why is persists.  This is often used by atheists as an attack on not just God’s existence but also his power:

A) If God is all-good, he would defeat evil

B) If God is all-powerful, he could defeat evil

C) But evil is not defeated, therefore

D) No such God exists. 

What should be the Christian’s response to this challenge?  We must agree with the first two premises, that God both would and could defeat evil.  It is the third premise that we must take issue with, and we should add one little word to it: “yet”.  Evil is not yet defeated.  Does this then mean that evil will never be defeated?  Of course not, just that it hasn’t been yet.  We don’t know when God will choose to defeat evil; it could be tomorrow or next year or next millennium.  The fact that evil isn’t yet defeated cannot be used to prove that it will never be.  After all, as Dr Geisler points out, the fact that you are in the middle of a novel doesn’t mean that it has no proper ending, does it?  Therefore, the conclusion that “no such God exists” does not follow.  See how powerful this three letter word is?  The whole argument collapses because of it.[6] 

Sometimes the comeback against this is for the atheist to rework his argument into this:

A) If God is all-good, he would defeat evil

B) If God is all-powerful, he could defeat evil

C) Evil will never be defeated, therefore

D) No such God exists. 

Spot the problem with this new third premise?  There is absolutely no way anyone could know that evil will never be defeated...unless he was God.  You’d have to know everything that is going to happen in the future to know that.  In other words, you’d have to be omniscient.  This means that in order for the atheist to defeat God he would have to be God! 

How, then, should the Christian respond to the persistence of evil in the world?  Our argument should look like this:

A) If God is all-good, he would defeat evil

B) If God is all-powerful, he could defeat evil

C) Evil has not yet been defeated, therefore

D) God will one-day defeat evil. 

How do we know that the conclusion is valid?  The nature of the God of the Bible guarantees it.  He’s all-powerful and can do it and he’s all-good and wants to do it, and one day he will.  Which leads us into our next point: the solution. 

The Solution to the Problem of Evil:

How will God finally defeat evil?  Firstly, he allows everyone to freely choose their eternal destiny, which preserves freedom.  He allows everyone to decide which way they want to go - his way or theirs.  Secondly, someday he will defeat evil by separating it from good, quarantining it away.  How do we stop diseases from spreading? We quarantine the sick.  How do we keep society safe?  We quarantine the violent and the dangerous.   There has to be a hell, or there’s no solution to the problem of evil!  There has to be a place where evil is separated from good.  Dr Geisler makes this observation: “heaven is a place where there will be no more evil to frustrate good people...hell is a place where there is no more good people to frustrate evil people.”  When the final judgement is done people will forever be where they want to be, where they choose to be.  Good must be rewarded and evil must be punished or a truly just solution has not occurred.  If God does not punish people for the evil acts they perpetrated then justice has not been served. 

Further, God will defeat evil by defeating the last and greatest evil: death.  His solution is already in place – it’s the Resurrection of Jesus!  According to the Bible God has achieved this victory when Christ came the first time, but his victory won’t be actualised until Christ’s return.  Colossians 2: 13-15 says that:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ.  He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.  And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. 

Hebrews 2: 14-15 tells us that Jesus has already defeated evil on the cross:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

So Jesus has already defeated the last and greatest evil, but when will he put his victory into action?  Not until his second coming:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True.  With justice he judges and makes war...The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.  Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.  He will rule them with an iron sceptre.  He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty (Revelation 19: 11, 14-15). 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea... he will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away (Revelation 21: 1, 4).

So evil has already been officially defeated at the cross, and it will be actually defeated at the second coming of Christ. 

The Purpose of Evil:

This is our third last point in this topic, and we need to move from merely looking at the presence of evil as being an entirely bad thing and look at some of the ways that it can actually lead to good.  Let’s look at another argument:

A) An all-good God must have a good purpose for everything

B) But there is no good purpose for some suffering (useless or innocent suffering, like a child dying of cancer)

C) Therefore, there cannot be an all-good God. 

This seems to resonate with a lot of people because it’s not hard to look around us and see some kind of evil or suffering for which we can find no good purpose.  For many people, this kind of suffering leads them to think that God, if he even exists, must be finite and not powerful enough to do anything about the suffering in the world.  So how should we respond to this?  It seems that the best response would be to admit that we don’t know the purpose for all suffering, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one!  There is an assumption built into the second premise of this argument, and that is that if we don’t know the purpose of suffering then no-body knows.  But if God is all-knowing, doesn’t that mean that he would know?  Just because we don’t know what the good purpose of evil is, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist, just that our knowledge is limited.  After all, we are only finite creatures.  An all-good, all-loving God must have a good purpose for everything (premise A) – we just don’t always know what it is.  The Bible is clear that God knows things we don’t.  Look at Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”  We don’t know why some things happen to us, but at least we know why we don’t know – God knows the secret things, we know only what has been revealed to us.  Also Romans 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”  There are instances in the Bible of sufferings that God has used for good purposes.  Think of Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, he spent years in prison but God used his situation to bring about the saving of countless lives, not just in his family, but in the whole country and region and through his family the establishment of the nation of Israel.  As he said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).  God allowed his suffering because it would produce a greater good. 

It is impossible for us finite humans to understand the ripple effect that any given event will have on history, but we can get an idea from some event of the past that we can now see have resulted in a good purpose.  Take, for example, the bombing of Pearl Harbour.  This resulted in the death and suffering of many thousands of people – but it brought America into World War Two and their added strength shortened the war by years and resulted in fewer deaths overall.  That’s just one short-term good that resulted from the evil act at Pearl Harbour, and who knows what other good that event has caused?  It is impossible for us to tell, but God knows.  Let’s look at another example.  In his book The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel recounts the story of a man who watched his wife accidentally back the car over his own daughter, killing her.  Let’s see what he says:

So deep was Marc’s initial despair that he had to ask God to help him breathe, to help him function at the most fundamental level.  Otherwise, he was paralysed by the emotional pain.  But he increasingly felt God’s presence, his grace, his warmth, his comfort, and very slowly, over time, his wounds began to heal. 

Having experienced God at his point of greatest need, Marc would emerge from this crucible a changed person, abandoning his career in business to attend seminary [Bible College].  Through his suffering – though he never would have chosen it, though it was horribly painful, though it was life-shattering at the time – Marc has been transformed into someone who would devote the rest of life to bringing God’s compassion to others who are alone in their desperation. 

In the pulpit for the first time, Marc was able to draw on his own experiences with God in the depths of sorrow.  People were captivated because his own loss had given him special insights, empathy, and credibility.  In the end, dozens of them responded by saying they too wanted to know this Jesus, this God of tears.  Now other hearts were being healed because of Marc’s having been broken.  From one couple’s despair emerges new hope for many.[7] 

So we can see that God can use even the most heart-breaking sorrow and suffering to bring about some good purposes.  Just because we can’t always see what it might be doesn’t mean that no good can come from it. 

Pain – Can it be Good?

But even more than just being able to use our pain to achieve some good purpose, pain can actually be a good in itself.  The physical pain that you feel when you put your hand on a hot stove causes you to take your hand away and prevents you from suffering serious burns.  The pain responses of our bodies are part of our built-in warning system.  You’ve got a pain in your tooth – better go and see a dentist.  Got a pain in your ankle?  Better take it easy for a few days so your body can repair itself.  Not all pain is bad! 

Also, as Dr Geisler points out, pain is a much better teacher than pleasure.  We often learn lessons that will benefit us for the rest of our lives through pain, but very rarely do we do so through pleasure.  C.S. Lewis characterises it this way, “God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.  It’s God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  God will often allow things to happen to us that are painful because he knows that sometimes that is what we need to focus our attention where it should be – on him.  He brings us to a place where our only hope is him, and it is in that place that we cry out to him.  Pain is God’s megaphone.  Hebrews 12:11 characterises it like this, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”  The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4: 16-18:

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

And Paul would know.  He tells us elsewhere what he has been through:

I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked (2 Corinthians 11:23-27). 

Paul realised that the suffering he was experiencing could be used by God to achieve a great good.  Sometimes we will never live to see the good.  It may happen years or decades later as the ripples spread out from our suffering, but we know that God can and will use it for good. 

God cannot force free creatures to love him – that’s a contradiction in terms that we saw clearly in the quote above from Bruce Almighty.  Lewis also saw it clearly when he wrote:

I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully "All will be saved." But my reason retorts, "Without their will, or with it?" If I say "Without their will" I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say "With their will," my reason replies "How if they will not give in?"[8]

God is love, and love persuades, not forces.   God will allow you to experience many things and through these experiences he will be trying to persuade you to focus on him, to follow him, to surrender to him.  But he won’t force you.  And this brings us back to hell.  Hell exists not simply because God is just and must punish evil, but because he so loving he won’t force people against their will.  Lewis sums it up nicely: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’  All that are in Hell, choose it”.[9] 

Logic vs. Emotions:

One final thought before finishing this Piece.  Christian philosopher and theologian Dr William Lane Craig breaks the Problem of Evil down into two parts: the logical problem and the emotional problem.  The logical problem is how we fit the reality of evil and suffering together with the Christian view of an all-powerful, all-loving God in a way that is logical, not contradictory.  Almost everything in this Piece so far has been addressing the logical problem, but we can’t end our discussion without visiting the emotional side of this problem. 

There aren’t any arguments that can be made with regards to the emotional problem; the emotions that one experiences when one goes through or witnesses suffering are too individual and personal.  Only two things can really be said about this side of the problem.  Firstly, decisions about the goodness or existence of God cannot be made on the basis of an emotional reaction.  Emotions cannot tell you anything about the truth of a belief, merely how palatable you find it.  Secondly, in order for you to cope better with the emotional problems that evil presents you need to have a firm grasp on the logical side.  That way, when the bottom drops out, when something bad happens to you or someone you know you are equipped to properly understand why it happened and, more importantly, why God allowed it to happen.  This will allow you to recognise the emotional response you are having as something temporary and will allow you to look at the issue in the proper way. 

---

[1] Interview with Craig Hazen by Jim Wallace on Stand to Reason Podcast 13^th July 2010. 

[2] Mere Christianity, pp41-42

[3] “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 262-269

[4] Evolution: The dissent of Darwin,’ Psychology Today 30(1):62, Jan-Feb 1997, cited in Creation, 20 (3): 44, June 1998

[5] There are some theologians today who claim that the fall did take God by surprise, that he doesn’t have all knowledge and that he is basically playing catch-up.  These theologians are called “open theists” and their ideas are contrary to Biblical teachings. 

[6] Another extremely powerful tiny word is “so”.  See Greg Koukl’s excellent article entitled “The Power of One Word” at http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8221.

[7] p. 73

[8]The Problem of Pain, pp. 106-107

[9]The Great Divorce, p69

Puzzle Piece 8: Morality - Where does it come from?

Puzzle Piece 8: Can Evolution Produce Real Morality?

How many of you have every watched the news and seen a report on some terrible crime that happened to someone, someone who was murdered, or bashed, and thought “that’s wrong - the person who did that should be punished”? Why did you think that? What was it about that person’s behaviour that you judged to be wrong? What makes an action morally good or bad? Is it just because your parents told you it was wrong, or is it wrong for some other reason? What is it about feeding the poor that everyone acknowledges is a morally praiseworthy action? What is it about torturing children for fun that everyone knows is wrong? We all realise that the first is good, and the second bad. But why is it good or bad? What makes a thing good or bad? That is what we want to talk about today, and I want to show you that the fact that a thing IS wrong or right is proof of the existence of God. So let’s talk about the different ways that people answer these questions.


For some people, right and wrong are simply products of our cultural and social evolution. This is really a form of Moral Relativism called Social or Cultural Relativism (for an in-depth look at relativism in general see Parts 1-4 of this Piece). Basically, they say ‘that’s wrong for you, but not for me’ or vice versa. They claim that true right and wrong don’t exist and what we think of as right and wrong are just by-products of our social and biological evolution. This idea becomes especially prevalent when Christian missionaries go to another culture and try to change the practices of that culture to make them more in line with Christianity. People are quick to tell us that we have no right to judge them or their culture, that we have no right to tell them that their way of living is wrong and ours is right. After all, their culture evolved that type of morality, and ours evolved a different type. Ours isn’t more right than theirs, just different.
This line of thinking is nicely summed up by Michael Ruse, a Philosopher of Science who says this:

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . And any deeper meaning is illusory.” ("Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269.)


This type of morality, it seems, makes a thing right or wrong because your society thinks it is. As our societies and cultures evolved so did our sense of right and wrong and that enabled us to live together more easily, which meant we were able to have more children and pass on our genes. That means that stealing is wrong because everyone in society agrees that it is, not because stealing is actually wrong. In the same way, we think that what Hitler did to the Jews is wrong only because we grew up in a society that holds those beliefs, not because what he did is actually wrong. After all, “ethics is illusory”.


Does this view make sense? It seems that this is not the correct way to look at and judge moral actions. What this means, really, is that when you rape someone, or torture a child for fun, all you have really done is break a social convention. You’ve done something that our society says you shouldn’t do, but that’s it! It reduces morality to mere social convention. In Japan, eating while you walk down the street is socially unacceptable – Japanese people don’t do that and they frown at you if you do. It seems to me that on the view of the moral relativists your committing some crime like rape is wrong for the same reason that eating in public is wrong in Japan – because society says so. Can you bring yourself to believe that?


A similar view to this is the one that says our morals come from millions of years of ‘instinct’. This is the view of Darwinists like Edward O. Wilson who works Harvard University. He is a biologist and naturalist, and is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He says that ‘thousands of generations gave rise to moral sentiment.” Basically, it’s an inherited instinct. What are the problems with this idea?


Firstly, we often have competing instincts. How do we know which instinct to follow? Secondly, we often hear something that tells us to ignore our strongest instincts and do the more noble thing. For example, if you hear someone getting mugged and calling for help, our stronger instinct might to be stay safe and not get involved. Our weaker instinct might be to help. Which instinct should we follow? We believe that we should do the right thing, and follow the instinct to help. Think about the stories you hear of men during the war who throw themselves on a grenade so that their mates are not killed. You can guarantee that his first instinct was to shield himself, but something else told him not to.


Or what about something closer to home. You’re in the playground and you see someone bullying someone else. You have one instinct to defend the weak and tell the bully to lay off. But another part of you wonders what will happen to you? Will he turn his attention to you? But you know the right thing to do. And where does that “something” that tells which instinct to listen to come from?
The following quote from C. S. Lewis sums it up nicely:

“You will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say the sheet of music which tells you...to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.” (Mere Christianity, p22).
Instinct alone cannot tell you what the right thing to do is.


Let’s look at third view on morality. Sometimes, when faced with the difficulties of moral relativism or instinct, people say that things are wrong if they violate our human rights. Murder is wrong because you have taken away that person’s right to life. But what’s the liability of this view? It’s this: where does man get his human rights without God giving them to him? If we are just highly evolved animals, then our rights come from...where? Nowhere! There is nothing in the evolutionary process that gives anybody any rights. Evolution is about survival of the fittest, kill or be killed. If I am stronger than you, why shouldn’t I kill you, or rape you, or steal from you? After all, no one says it’s morally wrong for the lion to kill the deer, or to kill off a rival male. If it’s not wrong for the lion, why should it be wrong for us? We are just slightly more evolved animals, after all. “But, we’re humans,” someone might say. So what? Unless there is Someone outside the evolutionary process to give us our value, we have only the same value as every other animal.


This idea has been embraced recently in attempts to grant rights to animals. “The Great Ape Project” is a group of people dedicated to getting certain rights given to the great apes of the world, supposedly our closest evolutionary relative. From their website:

“A chimpanzee is not a pet and can not be used as an object for fun or scientific experiment. He or she thinks, develops affection, hates, suffers, learns and even transmits knowledge. To sum it up, they are just like us. The only [sic] diffrerence is that they don’t speak, but they communicate through gestures, sounds and facial expressions. We need to [sic] garantee their rights to life and to liberty” (Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian, the founder of GAP Brazil and Director of GAP International since 2006, http://www.greatapeproject.org/en-US/oprojetogap/Missao).
This line of thinking has led to a woman trying to get an Austrian court to recognise a 26-year old chimpanzee as a person, so that he can be granted a legal human guardian if his zoo closes. The Austrian court denied her request, so she is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. The court of Human Rights.


In Switzerland, some members of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Biotechnology in 2009 argued that plants should not be harmed without ‘justification’ on the grounds that they ‘strive for something’ (e.g. to develop, to reproduce), and that they are a lot like us on the molecular level (http://creation.com/plants-rights-the-latest-evolutionary-absurdity). Now we have plant rights. Stop mowing the lawn – you’re murdering the grass! Do you see how the idea that we can get our human rights from the evolutionary process leads to absurdities? Without Someone outside the process to give out rights, either every form of life has them, or none do.


What idea makes the most sense of our moral experience then? The only system of morality that makes sense is the idea that your moral standards come from God, that He is the one who sets the rules, and those rules apply to us in Australia as much as they do to the wild tribes still living in the Amazon jungle that have never seen a white man. Let’s cache out this idea. It can be summed up in these three premises:

A. If God does not exists then objective moral values do not exist;
B. Objective moral values do exist; therefore
C. God exists

What do we mean by “objective moral values”? We mean moral values which are valid and binding independent of whether anybody believes in them or not. For example - the Holocaust was wrong, and it would be wrong even if the Nazis had won the war and brainwashed everybody into believing it was right.


Now it seems that the first premise has been suitably defended already today. We looked at three different systems of ethics that tried to ground morality without God in various naturalistic explanations and failed. The second premise that “objective moral values do exist” is the one that is going to cause us the most difficulty. Most people in the West have been taught a version of moral relativism their whole lives, something we can call Slogan Moralism: “don’t judge me”, “it’s true for me”, “tolerate others”.


These are slogans that people hear all the time, and there is often some truth in them, but most people they just adopt these ideas without really thinking about them. Let me give you an example. Say someone decides they don’t want a Christmas tree this year. It’s just too much hassle. Following the slogan “tolerate others” we’d be happy to tolerate their views. But should we tolerate ALL views? What if someone wants to sacrifice a child to the pagan god Moloch? Should we tolerate that behaviour? Of course not. But one of our slogans is to be tolerant of other people’s views. This is an example of how people adopt these slogans that they hear around the place without thinking about what they really mean, without realising the problems with their use.


While it’s true that people hold these ideas without really thinking about them, at the same time most people ALSO hold that some things are really, truly, objectively wrong. You’re probably not going to find anyone who is willing to say that there is not really anything wrong with sacrificing that child. Almost everyone believes that action to be wrong, regardless of the culture or time in which it took place. It was wrong when the Philistines did it in King David’s day, it’s wrong today. So what it looks like is that most people hold conflicting views about the nature of morality. In truth, most people haven’t actually sat down and thought about what they believe and why. They learn these slogans that they hear others use, and they adopt a bit of this and a bit of that, but deep down, when you really press someone on what they believe, you will find, 99 times out of 100, that they hold some moral truths to be objective. But a worldview that doesn’t feature God cannot make sense of this. We’ve looked at the attempts – they all fail! That is why this is such a powerful argument! It trades on what almost everyone, Christians and atheists, already believe – that some things are just wrong.


This argument can be worded another way, a way that might be a bit simpler to remember but is just as powerful. We can call it the Moral Law:

1. Every law has a law giver
2. There is a Moral Law (a standard of right and wrong)
3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver

This is a great way to state it, because not only does it call to mind the idea of someone writing a law and someone following that law, it also calls to mind penalties for breaking the law. And this is the real reason that people don’t want to acknowledge their need to ground morality in God – they don’t want to be held accountable for their actions!


British novelist Aldous Huxley is very candid about his reasons for not wanting there to be a God:

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is...concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” (Ends and Means, 1937, pp. 270, in http://creation.com/aldous-huxley-admits-motive-for-anti-theistic-bias)

In other words, if there is no actual law giver, then there is no penalty for breaking the law and we are free to do what we like! This is what drives a lot of ‘scepticism’ about God.


So, to conclude, we’ve examined a couple of the main naturalistic explanations for the existence of morals and found them to be wanting. We’ve seen that God is really the only source of morals that makes any sense of them. Next, we’ll answer the question, “If God exists, why doesn’t He stop bad things from happening to good people?”

Puzzle Piece 7: Morality - It's all Relative, Baby!

Puzzle Piece 7: Moral Relativism

This is the first four parts of a six part study into the issue of morality - right and wrong, good and evil. We will be spending the next four sessions discussing the issue of moral relativism, beginning with an investigation into what it actually is, then we'll move into a look at evolutionary accounts of morality and will finish up in part six with the question of why God allows evil to exist. These first four parts of this series follow the “It’s all Relative, Baby!” series used by Brett Kunkle (our thanks to him for this material – find it at www.strplace.org under “Parent/Leader Materials”). These are really important issues that require a slow and careful approach (hence the six part series...) and are some of the most important questions we need to ask ourselves in the 21st Century. I recommend you download all four and work your way through them at your own pace.

Puzzle Piece 6: Life – is it all related?

Puzzle Piece 6: is there good evidence for macroevolution?

In our examination of the information contained within the DNA molecule (see Puzzle Piece 5) we discovered several things that work together to show that not only is a naturalistic explanation for its origins unlikely in the extreme, even impossible, the very fact that each cell contains information cries out for an intelligent source. We saw that every source of information that we encounter in everyday life comes from an intelligent source without exception; that the appearance of design is so strong that Darwinists must keep reminding themselves to ignore it; and that this debate is really not one of science vs religion, but of good science vs bad science. Finally, we saw that the very definition of science is designed (no pun intended) to keep ID out from the beginning, and that ID isn’t simply a god-of-the-gaps explanation. This time we are going to move from the origin of the DNA molecule itself to the idea that all life shares a common ancestor.

Before beginning our investigation in earnest we need to ask a very important question, the same question we asked last time about the definition of science: what do you mean by that? Specifically, what do we mean when we use the term evolution? As you will very quickly see when you look at the scientific literature the term evolution has a variety of meanings and Darwinists often use the word to talk about very different things. Firstly, in its most broad characterisation it can mean simply change over time, the idea that livings things have changed as time has passed. This definition of evolution is uncontested by even the most ardent Creationist and is thus describing something that people across the full spectrum of origin beliefs all believe to be real. Secondly, it is used to describe changes within a species. A good example of this is the way a finch’s beak in the Galapagos lengthens or shortens over successive generations. When there is a drought and only the hard, tough seeds are left for food the finches with long, strong beaks are the only ones capable of cracking open the seeds to eat what’s inside. As a result, only the long-beaked finches survive. When times are better and there are plenty of soft seeds around the finches with shorter, weaker beaks are still able to feed and thus the average beak length of the population shortens. This type of change is also uncontested by all involved in this debate and is sometimes called microevolution.

Finally, the word evolution is used to refer to what we might call macroevolution, the idea that the tiny changes of microevolution result in entirely new body types and novel features. It’s important to note these differing uses of the same word because when you read about the latest ‘proof’ of evolution you need to be able to see which version of the word is being used. It is also important that you realise that while the evidence for microevolution is solid, macroevolution has never been observed to take place. Darwin took his idea of micro changes and said that with great time these small changes would result in large changes, and modern day Darwinists are using the same line of reasoning. So, with this as our foundation, let’s begin our investigation into macroevolution and see if the evidence for it really stacks up.

In their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Norm Geisler and Frank Turek list five reasons why micro changes are insufficient to explain the diversity of the biological world. Let’s look at what they are.

1. Genetic Limits – genetic limits seem to be built into the types of animals that exist, allowing small changes (microevolution) but not large changes (macroevolution). Consider the following example: it is possible to breed animals for certain genetic characteristics. Various types of dogs are a great example of this. We breed some dogs for size, others for length of hair, or type of hair, or a particular ability like scent tracking. Note that although this shows that minor changes have occurred the dogs still remain dogs! Scientists have performed similar experiments on fruit flies which have a life span of only a few weeks allowing us to observe many generations over a relatively short time and have found that not only do the fruit flies stay fruit flies the genetic changes are actually detrimental to the fly, not advantageous. This is frequently the case when you look at the changes brought about by natural selection.

Sometimes, however, a change might be advantageous to an organism, allowing it to resist a particular disease for example, but this is at the cost of genetic diversity. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are a good example of this.[1] Sometimes, a mutation will occur within a bacterium whereby the mechanism that pumps nutrients into the cell from outside breaks down and is less efficient. This means that the cell takes in less or no antibiotics and is not killed. This cell then multiplies and a new strain develops that is resistant to drugs. But see what’s actually happened? The new strain is actually a damaged version of the original – no new information or features have arisen, just a corruption of an existing thing. This is what some call “devolution”, the loss of genetic information, and it certainly cannot account for the massive amounts of new information that is needed to get from a simple organism to a more complex one.

2. Cyclical Change – Not only are there limits to the amount of change that we see within types, it seems that the changes are cyclical. In other words, the changes shift back and forth within the limits and are not directional towards the development of a new type of life as the theory of macroevolution claims. In the above example of the finches the beak length changed with the seasons: average beak length was long in the dry periods and shorter in the wet periods. This change moved back and forth and never led to anything new – the finches stayed finches! What changed was the proportion of long-beaked to short-beaked finches. It’s important to note also that this was a change on an existing species and nothing in this process can explain the origin of species to begin with.

3. Irreducible Complexity – In 1859 Darwin wrote, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Since Darwin’s day we have found biological systems that fit his description, like the ‘simple’ cell. The cell is a system that we can call ‘irreducibly complex’, something that is “composed of several well matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” This is the definition given by Dr Michael Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box, the book that popularised this argument. In other words all the parts of the molecular machine must be completely formed, in the right places, in the right sizes, in operating order, at the same time, for the machine to function. A car engine is an example of an irreducibly complex system. If you change one part, the size of the pistons for example, you must also change a whole number of other components (like the cam shaft, engine block and cooling system) or the engine will not function. This means that living things like the cell cannot be explained through a process of gradual and successive changes, because if they are missing any one part the whole will not function, and functionality is something that must be maintained at all times for a Darwinian mechanism to take place.

4. Nonviability of Transitional Forms – For natural selection to account for the development of new species there must be transitional forms, a creature that is between two species. For example, the Darwinian account of the origin of birds is that they evolved from reptiles. If this is the case there must have been (probably hundreds of) creatures that were between birds and reptiles, exhibiting features of both. Now, putting aside the problem that the fossil record contains no record of such transitional forms (more on this later) would such a creature be viable? Would it be able to survive long enough to pass its unique DNA on to subsequent generations? It doesn’t seem likely. Consider the reptile-to-bird scenario. There must have been an animal that had something in between scales and feathers, yet feathers are an irreducibly complex system. Without fully developed feathers the creature could not fly. It would lack the protection offered by scales and would we easy prey on land and water. You must remember that we are talking about a single reptile being born with some kind of mutation that is on the path to feathers and that single reptile needs to be able to breed and pass on that genetic mistake to its offspring etc. Even the death of a single creature on this chain from reptile to bird would stunt the process! So the problem for Darwinists is twofold. Firstly, there is no mechanism that can allow such a transition to occur, and secondly the transitional form would be unlikely to survive.

5. Molecular Isolation – for many Darwinists the greatest evidence of common descent is the fact that all living things contain DNA and that many creatures share a large percentage of their DNA with other creatures. This is taken as a sign of common origin since we share similar genetics. Often you will hear people saying that the DNA of humans and apes is 95% similar showing that they are our closest living relative. But is this evidence for common ancestry or evidence for a common designer? It could be interpreted either way! Perhaps we share a common genetic code because a designer designed us to all live in the same biosphere. After all, if every living creature were biochemically different would the food chain exist? Perhaps it’s not possible to have life forms with significantly different biochemistries living in the same biosphere.

But is similarity even enough? Some studies suggest that humans also share about 90% of their DNA with mice, yet no one suggests that a mouse is a particularly close ancestor! In 2006 New Scientist reported a study that showed that horses and bats are more closely related (genetically speaking) than horses and cows![2] It should be noted at this point that the studies that claim a 95%+ similarity between humans and apes are not talking about the whole DNA, just the small coding region that makes up about 10% of the DNA strand. So 10% is about 95% similar and there are significant differences in the remainder.

Finally, we should expect to see similarities across the species at the molecular level if they are all related. For example, proteins, the building blocks of life, are composed of long chains of amino acids; usually more than 100 long and they must be in a very specific order. If all species share a common ancestor shouldn’t we expect to find similarities between fish and amphibians, or reptiles and mammals? We don’t. Michael Denton, molecular biologist, writes that:

At a molecular level there is no trace of the evolutionary transition from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. So amphibian, always traditionally considered intermediate between fish and the other terrestrial vertebrates are in molecular terms as far from fish as any group of reptiles or mammals!

So even though all organisms share a common genetic code, the code has ordered our molecules in such a way that the basic types are in molecular isolation from one another.

What about the Fossil Record?

If macro evolution really took place over billions of years, producing countless transitional forms, we should expect to see huge amounts of these preserved in the fossil record. But we don’t. This was a problem Darwin himself recognised when he asked, “Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” Darwin thought that we would eventually discover these fossils, but he was wrong. Today, 150 years after he wrote those words, there is still not sufficient evidence from the fossil record to prove his claims. There should be thousands, possibly millions, of fossils depicting a slowly increasing complexity over time, but they are simply missing. This is recognised by people on both sides of the debate. The late Steven J Gould, a palaeontologist from Harvard University and an evolutionist, said this:

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1). Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; Morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2). Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed’.

In other words, fossil types appear suddenly, fully formed, and remain the same until they go extinct. Gould, recognising the problems this presented Darwinism, went on the postulate a theory called “Punctuated Equilibria” where species evolve rapidly over short periods of time, but could propose no naturalistic mechanism that might allow this to happen.

What we find in the fossil record is that almost all of the major groups of animals appear suddenly in the fossil record in a stratum that is from the Cambrian period, some 500-600 million years ago. According to Jonathan Wells, “The fossil evidence is so strong, and the event so dramatic, that it has become known as ‘the Cambrian explosion,’ or ‘biology’s big bang.’” The fossil record simply cannot establish the ancestral relationship between species. Indeed, the evidence that it provides is so bad that Henry Gee, chief science writer for the pro-evolution magazine Nature, says that using fossils to show common ancestry isn’t even scientific: “To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story – amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”

So why do so many people cling to Darwinism? We have seen that it cannot account for almost any part of the biological world, and that design is a better explanation that certainly makes more sense, but the idea of common descent is still held to by many people, lots of whom have the letters Ph.D. after their names! There are a couple of reasons that should be considered.

1. This isn’t purely an intellectual issue. There is more at stake! Richard Lewontin, evolutionary biologist and geneticist, has very candidly stated the motivations behind many Darwinists adherence to an explanation that he admits is sometimes absurd:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[3]

British novelist Aldous Huxley is very candid about his reasons for not wanting there to be a God, which is the logical inference if ID is true:

I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is...concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.[4]

Former atheist Lee Strobel reveals that he had the same motivation for accepting a Darwinian explanation, “I was more than happy to latch onto Darwinism as an excuse to jettison the idea of God so I could unabashedly pursue my own agenda in life without moral constraints.” In Darwinism there is no moral accountability, and people can live life however they wish. This is not to say that all people who hold to evolution do so for these reasons, but it is certainly a powerful motivator for some!

2. Some people are truly persuaded by the evidence that Darwinism is true, that the evidence actually supports their position, but many people don’t look at all the evidence in fields outside their own. Jonathan Wells observes that “most biologists are honest, hard-working scientists who insist on accurate presentation of the evidence, but who rarely venture outside their own fields.” People have been so indoctrinated into believing that evolution is fact that even if they find little evidence for evolution in their field, they’re confident the evidence is elsewhere, maybe in genetics, or another area of biology. This means that many people don’t challenge the accepted story.

3. Finally, the pressure in academic circles to accept Darwinism is nearly overwhelming! Consider Ben Stein’s recent documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in which he discovers that many highly qualified scientist have been fired or had research grants taken away from them because they’ve publically supported ID. Even if they don’t find themselves on the receiving end of formal academic sanctions, they are often subjected to ridicule. Consider this quote from Richard Dawkins, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane...”.

What we’ve seen in this particular Puzzle Piece is that macroevolution, the idea that all life shares a common ancestor, is unsupported by evidence but that many people still cling to it for a variety of reasons, not all of which stem from an objective examination of the evidence. Next time, we’ll get into the issue of morality and see if true right and wrong exist and if God is necessary to account for them.

---

[1] “Anthrax and antibiotics: is evolution relevant?”, by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, http://creation.com/anthrax-and-antibiotics-is-evolution-relevant, accessed Sunday August 1 2010.

[2] “Bats and horses get strangely chummy”, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9402-bats-and-horses-get-strangely-chummy.html, accessed Sunday August 1 2010.

[3] “Billions and Billions of Demons”, Richard Lewontin, http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm, accessed Sunday August 1 2010.

[4] Ends and Means, 1937, pp. 270, in http://creation.com/aldous-huxley-admits-motive-for-anti-theistic-bias, accessed Sunday August 1 2010.

Prepared by D England using material from Chapter 6 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek, unless otherwise cited. Translated for Youth by J Simmons.