This began as a presentation I gave at the 2023 Higher Things conference at SIU in Illinois. I am currently working on converting the content into book form.
The slides are available as a pdf here.
A video recording of the presentation is below.
The core points are as follows:
The Problem of Evil
- Man says, “A good God would have prevented evil.”
- But logic dictates:
- Starting assumption: Let “God” be defined as the supreme being: the highest authority over everything who is all-powerful and all-knowing.
- Therefore, God is the author of the definition of “good”.
- As an all-powerful, all-knowing supreme being, God acts in accord with His own standards.
- Therefore, God is good. (He asserts this Himself. See Matthew 19:17 and James 1:17.)
- If anyone attempts to accuse God of evil / wrongdoing:
- The accuser asserts their definition of good as an authority over God.
- Therefore, that definition is made a higher authority than God, to which God must conform if He is to be judged as objectively good.
- But God is, by definition, the highest authority. Logical contradiction.
- Therefore, no one can accuse God of evil / wrongdoing.
- If God doesn’t act according to my idea of good (such as by allowing evil to exist):
- Therefore, my definition of good is opposed to God’s definition of good.
- All opposition to good must be evil.
- Therefore, all opposition to God must be evil.
- If I define good and evil in a way that opposes God’s definition, then I am in opposition to God.
- Therefore, I am evil.
- Our good God is a God who destroys evil. He will burn all evil on judgment day, as He has warned. But for now He is being patient toward you, so that you can repent and be saved and share in His joy and love in His kingdom. (See 2 Peter 3.)
The Age of the Universe
- Assume God made the world in 6 literal days in the way He said He did. (Gen. 1)
- Assume that on the 7th day you are able to observe creation and apply a dating method to what you see.
- For example, you can apply a model that human hair grows at about 6 inches per year.
- You apply your dating method and determine that the thing you observe is older than 6 days.
- You see that Eve has hair that is 3 feet long, and you conclude that her hair is 6 years old.
- Contradiction: By the premise, creation is only 6 days old.
- Fallacy of assuming the conclusion: Your dating method assumes that what you observe came about gradually from the physical processes of creation.
All dating methods must assume that the entire span of the timeframe that they are used to model is influenced entirely and only by the gradual, continuous processes of physical creation. That assumption is invalidated if God created the processes of physical creation during that timeframe, or if God created the object that is being modeled as fully-formed in any way during that timeframe.
No dating method can logically claim that the creation account in the Bible is false without assuming its conclusion.
The Blindness of Faith
Some assert that:
- “Faith” is believing something contrary to rational observation.
- Therefore all “faiths” are irrational.
- Therefore the Christian Faith is irrational.
This is the fallacy of equivocation. Each of the 3 lines above uses the word “faith” in a different sense:
- “Faith” in the sense of believing something contrary to rational observation.
- This is called “fideism”, which historical Christianity rejects, though it became popular in the 1800s through today.*
- “Faith” in the sense of a religion.
- This sense of the word only rose in common usage in the late 1900s.*
- Faith as “The Christian Faith”
- Christianity is the first to use the word “faith” in a religious sense. It was a secular word in Greek prior to Christ.
- “The Christian Faith” refers to the faith, the fealty, that followers of Christ bear toward Him. It is not founded on belief for its own sake (fideism), but on the testimony of rational eyewitness observations of the event of His resurrection from the dead, which proves His authority as King and God and Savior. (1 Cor. 15)
The Christian Faith is not blind. But we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5) in the sense that, while we walk through this life, we do not focus on the present pain but on the future reward that Christ our King promised us. By faith, we believe that promise, because God in Christ has kept all His past promises and has proved that He has the power to fulfill them.
*See the book “Faith Misused” by Alvin J. Schmidt for details on the different senses of the word “faith” in English over the years.