'Ankerberg: How can physical evils like earthquakes,
tornadoes and cancer be explained in God’s
good world?
And that brings us to the purpose.
Let’s talk about the purpose for these things.
Talk to us.
Geisler: Well, the problem is, if God is all
good, He has to have a good purpose for everything.
But reality shows us that there are some things
for which there is no good purpose.
There’s no good purpose for throwing babies
in the air and catching them on bayonets,
as ''The Brothers Karamazov'', Dostoevsky’s
novel, shows.
There’s no good purpose for innocent people
being killed or suffering.
And we can all think of illustrations where
there was just no good purpose for it.
Well, now, if there is no good purpose for
any one thing in the universe, then God can’t
be all good because, see, if He is an all-good
God, then He has a good purpose for all.
But if there’s something for which there
is no good purpose, then He can’t be an
all-good God.
So, that’s the painful dilemma.
Ankerberg: And I mean, we’re talking just
one.
Geisler: One thing.
Ankerberg: So, anybody that’s listening,
if you’ve got one gripe at God, you’re
saying this should not have happened.
Geisler: That’s it.
Ankerberg: We’re talking your tune right
now, so what’s the...
Geisler: Well, it’s a powerful argument.
Dr. Mavrodes, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy,
taught at the University of Michigan, wrote
a book years ago, ''Belief in God''.
He is a brilliant philosopher and teaches
at one of the top secular schools in the country
and made this simple distinction.
He said there’s a big difference between
saying “I do not know the purpose for this
event” and “There is no purpose.”
As a matter of fact, there are a lot of things
that I don’t know the purpose for and I
can’t explain them.
I can’t explain why your loved one died.
I can’t explain why you lost your job, why
your daughter died.
I can’t explain all those things.
But I know there is an explanation, and here’s
why: because I know there is an all-good God
who is all knowing.
Now, if He is all knowing, He knows everything.
If He’s all good, He has a good purpose
for everything.
So, even if I don’t know it, I know God
knows it.
And I also know there are good reasons for
me not knowing it.
Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things
belongeth to the Lord our God, but to us and
to our children the things that are revealed.”
Romans 11:33: “His ways are unsearchable
and his judgments past finding out.”
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
lean not to your own understanding” (Prov.
3:5).
So, we know that we don’t know the good
purpose for everything, but we know the One
who does know the good purpose for everything.
And what the atheist would have to show to
make his argument stick is, there is no good
purpose for some events and no one knows any
good purpose.
Well, he’d have to be omniscient.
He’d have to be God to know that.
He would have to know everything to know that
there’s no one in the universe who knows
a good purpose for this suffering.
And even though I don’t see it, sometimes,
given enough time – even in this lifetime
– I figured out, “Oh, that’s why my
loved one died: so and so came to the Lord.
That changed somebody else’s life.”
And I can look back and see, even in my lifetime,
many things I couldn’t explain at the time.
Later I saw, “Yes, God did have a good purpose”
and in fact, we know some of those good purposes.
Ankerberg: The critics will come back on you
and say, “That might be true philosophically,
but we’ve got two things going on.
We’ve got moral evil – which we could
say comes from our free choice, but, hey,
we’ve also got physical evil that I didn’t
choose.”
And they put it in a syllogism this way: “Moral
evil can be explained by free will.”
I’ll grant you that one.
“But physical evil does not result from
free will.”
We’re talking about earthquakes, tornadoes,
hurricanes, meteors, floods, genetic deformity,
cancer.
I didn’t choose that one.
“Hence, physical evils cannot be explained
by free choice,” that is, no one chooses
to have these things.
So, where and why do these things come to
us?
Geisler: That’s a good question and it’s
a good topic for a whole program.
Maybe we could do a whole program on it.
Let me give you just a little short answer
for it.
We do see that there’s a good purpose for
many evils in our life, and we do see that
they’re all connected with free will.
For example, if I freely abuse my body, say,
for example, smoke myself to cancer of the
lungs and die of cancer of the lungs, whose
fault is it?
That was a free choice; I brought a physical
evil on myself.
If I use my freedom and become a drunk and
abuse my children, my free choice was a cause
of the evil that is happening on somebody
else.
So then a lot of the evil in the universe
can be explained by free choices that bring
evil directly on ourselves and directly on
someone else.
