Thank you God for female genital mutilation, that has helped millions of girls to learn and grow spiritually. Thank you God I and my whole family were killed in that earthquake although we didn’t get much chance to learn much and grow and mature from that experience. Thank you God that my mother has Alzheimers for ten years. So – thank you God that Ted Bundy kidnapped, raped and killed my daughter then went back and violated her corpse. In Heaven we will say to God “Thank you so much for this little pain I didn’t understand at the time, and that little pain these I now see were the most precious things in my life.

Well, the answer is that there are no good people.Īnd follows up by saying we should thank God for all the suffering we get to go through on Earth. Strobel puts the question : “But good people suffer just as much – or sometimes more- than the bad.” The point of our lives in this world isn’t comfort, but training and preparation for eternity….suffering is compatible with God’s love if it is medicinal, remedial, and necessary that is, if we are very sick and desperately need a cure. The universe is a soul-making machine, and part of that process is learning, maturing, and growing through difficult and challenging and painful experiences. Therefore he’s not being evil by allowing pain to exist. It’s at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. That’s at least intellectually possible…. If God’s wisdom vastly exceeds ours… it is at least possible that a loving God could deliberately tolerate horrible things like starvation because he foresees that in the long run more people will be better and happier than if he miraculously intervened. Kreeft’s two ideas here are that suffering on Earth is short-term, and people who moan about it are just not seeing the big picture. Let me say that neither the author Lee Strobel nor Prof Kreeft spends any time contemplating that maybe God isn’t good or loving. Or, he wanted to prevent the birth of Hitler, but he couldn’t, because he’s not omnipotent. So, God could choose to prevent the birth of Hitler, because he could, but he didn’t do that, so he’s omnipotent but not good. God may be all powerful and he may be Good but he cannot be both, because of the presence of evil. See what you think.Īs you will know the problem was stated by Epicurus 300 years before Christ :

Maybe for the first time I am beginning to really get an idea of the worldview of the thinking Christian. It was pretty mind-blowing.Ĭhapter 1 deals with the problem of Evil which is always the Big One, and here we find a very remarkable interview with Peter Kreeft, Christian philosopher.

The case for faith lee strobel