Intro to Apologetics for a multi-week home group course by a BEd and Biola MA Apologetics grad. An overview of the Christian view of evil and suffering including definitions, traditional approach, historical development, current understandings, objections and responses, a better alternative, and the atheists' dilemma.

1. Introduction to
Apologetics
Text

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Perov

6. DEFINITIONS

7. EVIL
all that is opposed to God
and His purposes; that
which, from the human
perspective, is harmful and
nonproductive (suffering)

8. unjustifiable reality; disorder;
something that occurs and
ought not to Henri Blocher
EVIL

9. 2 ASPECTS
evil endured, misfortune;
evil committed, wickedness
Henri Blocher

10. the branch of theo-philosophy
that addresses the problem of
evil
THEODICY

11. the vindication of divine
goodness and providence in
view of the existence of evil
THEODICY

12. The attempt
to “justify the
ways of God
to men.”
John Milton
Benjamin Vandergucht

13. Attempt to justify God's actions

15. Distinguishing a Theodicy from a Defence

16. CLASSICAL
APPROACH
Moral Evil
Natural Evil

17. Natural Evil

20. evil committed
evil endured
Moral Evil

26. HISTORICAL
OVERVIEW

27. DEUT. 28 If you fully obey the Lord your God
and carefully follow all his commands I give you
today, … all these blessings will come on you
and accompany you…
However, if you do not obey the Lord your
God and do not carefully follow all his
commands and decrees I am giving you today,
all these curses will come on you and overtake
you…
Ancient Jews

28. Epicurus, 300BC

30. DEUT. 28 If you fully obey the
Lord your God…However, if
you do not obey the Lord your
God…
Jesus

31. Evil, the most frequent
objection to God, loses to
the resurrection. Death, a
great evil, is not the last
word.
The Cross

32. Soul-Making Theodicy
Irenaeus, 200AD

33. Origen, 200AD
Irenaeus “Plus”

34. by Botticelli
Augustine, 400AD
Free Will Theodicy

35. Evils appear in creation when
created things and creatures
stop functioning in the way they
were created to function, when
they cease to have the being
God intended them to have.

36. Calvin, 1500AD
Augustine “Plus”

37. Leibniz, 1500AD
The best
of all
possible
worlds.

38. Process of Creation
Hick, 1950AD

39. Plantinga, 1980AD
Free Will Defence

40. Plantinga’s Defence:
“A world containing
creatures who are
significantly free (and
freely perform more
good than evil actions)
is more valuable, all
else being equal, than
a world containing no
free creatures at all.

41. “Now God can
create free creatures,
but He can't cause
or determine them to
do only what is right.
For if He does so,
then they aren't
significantly free after
all; they do not do
what is right freely.

42. “To create creatures
capable of moral
good, therefore, He
must create creatures
capable of moral evil;
and He can't give
these creatures the
freedom to perform
evil and at the same
time prevent them
from doing so.

43. “As it turned out, sadly enough,
some of the free creatures God
created went wrong in the
exercise of their freedom; this is
the source of moral evil. The
fact that free creatures
sometimes go wrong, however,
counts neither against God's
omnipotence nor against His
goodness; for He could have
forestalled the occurrence of
moral evil only by removing the
possibility of moral good.

44. CURRENT VIEWS

45. Evil is Necessary
Greater Good

46. Free Will
Not God’s Fault

47. Soul-Making
Virtue & Character Development

48. This isn’t Heaven
Heaven

49. Skeptical Theism
We Can’t Know

50. Innocent Suffering
No-one is Innocent

51. It’s God’s Will
‘Everything
happens
for a
reason’

52. “People ask me why I’m an Arminian and not
a Calvinist. My most basic answer is that I
believe Calvinism is impossible as it implies
that God does what is morally wrong. Of
course, no Calvinist I know says they believe
that…. What wrong? Foreordaining and
rendering certain all that occurs, including the
fall and the Holocaust. Roger E. Olson, edited

54. God With Us

55. One Day

56. PEBBLES IN SHOES

58. “My main objection to Christianity and
other monotheistic faiths is the problem of
evil, which the religious scholar Huston
Smith has called “the shoal on which all
theologies founder. ” If God is all-powerful,
just and loving, why then is existence so
painful and unfair for so many people?
Why do kids get cancer? Why do
earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural
disasters kill so many people? I have
never encountered a satisfying solution to
the problem of evil . JOHN HORGAN

59. “I sympathize with Horgan’s main
objection–the problem of evil and pain.
It is the hardest problem for both of us.
Yet for me it leads to God and not
away from him for several reasons.
Firstly, at the intellectual level, if there is
no God then I agree with thinkers from
Dostoyevsky to Dawkins who say that
there is no such thing as evil (e.g.
Dawkins’ famous statement: “there is
no good…no evil… no justice…DNA
just is and we dance to its music”).
Rather contradictory then to talk about
a problem of evil at all. JOHN LENNOX

60. “Second, getting rid of God does not get rid of the
suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since
it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan
denies this … but I still maintain he has no ultimate
personal hope to offer for anyone, including
himself. The vast majority of people who have ever
lived have suffered and not received justice in this
life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end,
then these people will never receive justice since
there is no life to come.

61. “Third, whether God could have made a world in which fire
warmed but didn’t burn and there were no destructive
earthquakes is difficult. After all, earthquakes are
paradoxically essential for the maintenance of life.
Certainly, God could have made a world in which there was
no moral evil. But there would have been no humans in it–it
would be a robotic world. The greatest God-given capacity
we humans have is the capacity to love. It inevitably carries
with it the capacity to hate. Hence the world presents us all
with a mixed picture – beauty and barbed wire.

62. “The question I ask is, granted that this
is so, is there anywhere evidence of the
existence of a God whom I can trust
with this deep issue? Yes. At the
heart of Christianity there is a cross.

64. I’m DISSATISFIED

66. Perichoresis
& Kenosis

69. The Atheist’s
Dilemma

70. EVIL EXISTS?then good does too

71. GOOD EXISTS?then Moral Law does too

72. MORAL LAW EXISTS?then God does too

73. GOD EXISTS?then Atheism fails

74. OR ELSE . . .no God =
no Moral Law =
no good =
no evil

75. The Atheist
cannot hold to both
Atheism & evil.
He must deny one.