May 21, 2025 • 30 mins
We do strange things when we’re desperate. Pain can cause us to deny the obvious if we convince ourselves it will give relief. This is why some turn to atheism. The thought of an all-powerful, all-loving God is a heavy weight to bear in a world of suffering and sin. For these atheists, the only way to live with this problem is to deny that such a God exists. But as we will see in this episode, that is no way to live. Atheism doesn’t give answers. It doesn’t give hope. It certainly doesn’t bring happiness. Instead, unbelief causes bitterness and unbearable emptiness. And, we will see that for all its claims to rationality and intellectualism, atheism is a simplistic response to a problem that is way over their heads. Every time atheists charge that God cannot exist because of evil in the world, they contradict themselves. We’ll explain how in this episode.
Read about this subject
- Scriptures: Acts 17:24-28; Romans 1:18-20; Psalm 14:1; Psalm 19:1-3
- Pillars of the Faith
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hi, I am Kerry Duke, host of My Godand My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee
Bible College, where we see the Bibleas not just another book, but the Book.
Join us in a study of the inspiredWord to strengthen your faith and to
share what you've learned with others.
A lot of people use the internet thesedays to learn about God and religion,
(00:22):
and out of all the searches for answersabout God, what question would you
say that people are asking the most?
Recent reports indicate that it's thevery question we've been talking about.
The age old problem of evil.
The top three questions in Google searchesaccording to the numbers are these.
(00:42):
Number one, why does Godallow suffering and evil?
Number two, does life have a purpose?
And number three, does God exist?
It's interesting that after thousandsof years, with all of our advances in
medicine and technology and other areas,mankind is still asking the same things.
(01:05):
Some questions just won't go away.
That's because some things don't change.
Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse nine iswhere Solomon said 3000 years ago, “The
thing that has been it is that whichshall be. And that which is done is that
which shall be done, and there is no newthing under the sun.” So it's encouraging
(01:31):
that God anticipated these concerns andHe addressed them in the Bible long ago.
These three questions are also connected.
I'm talking about the question,why does God allow suffering the
question, does life have a purpose,and the question, does God exist?
These are all interconnected.
The answer to one affectshow you answer the others.
(01:54):
And today in this lesson, we willsee that one popular approach to
the problem of evil will not work.
That approach is atheism, and we areabout to see why in this lesson that
we'll call “Atheism is no answer.”
You can say the same thing aboutagnosticism and skepticism.
Agnosticism is different from atheism.
(02:17):
It's the view that no one canbe sure whether God exists.
Atheism, on the other hand, triesto prove God does not exist.
It claims to know that God is not real.
Agnostics, on the other hand,believe we just can't be sure.
They are skeptical about everything.
They question what Christians say and evenwhat atheists say, and then they tell us
(02:40):
that no one can be certain either way.
They question everything, thatis, except their contention
that no one can know for sure.
But that's the very thing they claim tobe sure about—that no one can be sure.
So when these people—and I'm talkingabout agnostics—when they say they
don't believe in God because ofall the evil in the world, they
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reason like a dog chasing its tail.
But an atheist looks at thesethree questions and gives a
definite answer to each one.
Why does God allow eviland suffering an atheist?
God is supposed to beall-powerful and all-loving.
A God like that, an atheist says,could not and would not allow all
(03:23):
the suffering and evil in the worlda. But since there is so much evil
in the world, the conclusion forthe atheist is God does not exist.
But if there is no God in atheisticthinking, then the atheist has to answer
the question (03:37):
Then why are we here?
What's the purpose of all this?
What's the meaning of life?
Now atheists answer thatthere is no purpose to live
or reason for us being here.
There is no meaning to life.
Where does that kindof thinking leave them?
Well, if there's no purpose for allthis, especially all of what they
(04:00):
call pointless suffering in the world,then how are we to feel about life?
So in the atheistic camp,there are two ways of thinking.
There are two different kinds of atheists.
Now there are more, but there aretwo basic kinds of atheists when
it comes to this problem of evil.
In regard to the question,What is the purpose of life?
What is the meaning of allthis?—some atheists dwell on
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how empty and hopeless life is.
They live in a world of painand sorrow and violence, and
to them there is no answer.
There is no reason for us being here andno hope of where we're going [to them].
There is no God to help usmuch less to comfort us.
There is no heaven to go to when we die.
(04:45):
We live in a dark world and there isnothing that we can do about that.
The name for an atheist who thinkslike this is the word existentialist.
Now that word has a variety of meaningsin religious circles, but in the
philosophical world where atheismand skepticism reign supreme, an
existentialist is one who says, “We exist,we are here. Don't look for a reason
(05:11):
why or a purpose, just live with it,because there is no God to explain it.”
Now, obviously, this is a very gloomy,pessimistic, depressing outlook on life.
How could anyone think likethis without becoming suicidal?
And sad to say that's whatit sometimes leads to.
(05:32):
On the other hand, there are otheratheists who say, “You've got it
all wrong.” Getting rid of thethought of God makes them feel
good without God in the picture.
There are no rules.
There's no guilt.
There's no fear of hell.
Now, this camp of atheists don't thinka world without purpose is depressing.
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They see it as a reason to celebrate.
It reminds me of what the Biblesays in First Corinthians 15,
verse 32 about people who donot believe in life after death.
Paul is basically saying there, ashe quotes the Old Testament in Isaiah
chapter 22, 13 and 14, “Let us eatand drink, for tomorrow, we die.”
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So these atheists, in contrast to theexistentialist, try to be positive.
They try to be optimistic.
They see a bright future aheadwhere mankind can explore
and discover and create.
And if you ask them about all thesuffering and evil in the world,
if you ask them, “What about all ofthat? What are you going to do? How
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do you deal with it?”—they will tellyou that they're working on that.
And in time they will tell you thathuman beings can eradicate things like
disease and crime and maybe even death.
Now this type of atheist is often calleda humanist, and they are very, very naive.
In fact, they're very dishonest aboutthe world and the facts about it.
(06:56):
They're also very arrogant.
In 1973, a group of renowned scientistsand educators wrote a manifesto
called the Humanist Manifesto Two.
In it, they stated their goalsfor a world without religion.
They say, “No deity will save us. Wemust save ourselves.” It's interesting
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that this booklet talks about how atheismplans to deal with the problem of evil
and suffering in regard to morals.
This manifesto says thatnothing is absolute in ethics.
Nothing is right or wrong for everybody.
Every person decides whatis good or bad for him.
In regard to human suffering, itsays that people should work together
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to have peace on earth and to putan end to things like poverty.
And one thing these atheistsagree on is that they don't need
God to accomplish any of this.
Now that's the humanist agenda.
But regardless of which view ofatheism a person holds, an atheist
will point to evil and suffering as areason why he does not believe in God.
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Here are a couple of examples of men thatwere well-known atheists who were very
bold in denying God on that very basis.
So consider these men.
Robert Ingersoll was afamous orator in America.
He lived from 1833 to 1899.
He was so gifted and accomplished atpublic speaking that people would pay
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money and fill places to hear him speakfor three to four hours on politics,
religion, and history, and other topics.
He was a notorious skeptic.
He ridiculed the Bible, he blasphemed God.
He loved to point to stories in the Biblelike the Israelites’ war against the
Canaanites, and then he would ask, “If thedevil had been in command of the Israelite
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army instead of God, how could he havedone any worse than what God commanded
the Israelites to do when he told themto kill every man, woman, and child?”
So Ingersoll not only said he couldn'tbelieve in the God of the Bible because
of all the evil in the world, but healso said he didn't believe in God
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because of all the evil in the Bible.
Now, there's much more that we could sayabout that in response, but right now
I'm simply pointing out some examplesof how people use this problem of
evil to reach the level of atheism.
Number two, we find a manby the name of Anthony Flew.
He lived from 1923 to 2010.
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He was a brilliant, highlyeducated man by worldly standards.
He was a world-renowned atheistwho wrote, lectured, and debated
to destroy belief in God.
He said believing in Godwas like believing in the
tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.
But then after decades of fightingagainst God, he shocked the world
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when he was in his early eighties byannouncing that he had changed his mind.
He decided that he couldno longer be an atheist.
He released his autobiography in 2007.
The title is, There is a God withthe subtitle How The World's Most
Notorious Atheist changed his Mind.
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I was like a lot of peoplewhen I heard about this, so I
bought the book and read it.
I wanted to know, first of all, whatmade him decide to be an atheist to
begin with, and second, I was interestedin what led him to change his mind.
And I found both answers in the book.
Flew starts by telling us thathe was not an atheist always.
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As a matter of fact, his father wasa Methodist minister, but he said
although it was hard for him to put hisfinger on any one thing that marked his
transition to atheism, he said there isone thing that affected him early on.
He admitted it.
It was the problem of evil.
Now, the Flew family lived in England,and Anthony Flew said that as a
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young man, his father would takehim on trips to France and Germany
in the 1930s before World War II.
There he saw how the Germanswere mistreating Jews.
There he saw thousands of Nazisoldiers marching in support of Hitler.
He said in his autobiography thathe could not express in words how
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deeply these experiences influencedhis very young mind, and as a
result, he became an atheist.
He could not see how anall-powerful, all-loving God
could allow such evil to exist.
Then after decades of being an atheist,after all those years of writing and
debating against God, he changed his mind.
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Why?
It's simple.
It was, he says in hisown words, nature itself.
It was God's creation.
It had been right in front ofhim all that time, all his life,
but he was too proud to see it.
He finally came out and said, “I nowbelieve that the universe was brought into
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existence by an infinite intelligence.”
Now those words “infiniteintelligence” are interesting.
That's the sad part abouthis so-called conversion.
He never said he believedin the God of the Bible.
The God of the Bible is not onlyinfinite in knowledge, but He's
also infinite in love and powerand justice and all his attributes.
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So when Flew said that he changed hismind and became a believer in God, he
was talking about the God of deism.
Now, that's a God who made theworld, but has not intervened
with it since he made the world.
Now, that was a popular viewwhen the United States began.
Thomas Jefferson heldto that kind of view.
Thomas Paine was a deist as well.
And at the same time, Flew waslike a lot of people today.
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A lot of people today want to believein God and say they believe in God,
but it's not the God of the Bible.
They say they believe in God, butthey don't want to answer to God.
They don't want to have rules from God.
So Flew died without believing inthe true God, without believing in
Jesus, and without believing in theBible as the inspired word of God.
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He had turned to atheismbecause he thought it was the
answer to the problem of evil.
But in the end, he admittedit was no answer at all.
Now, one thing we do see in his storyis that there is no excuse for anyone
being an atheist because nature itselfshows the existence of God to everyone
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everywhere on the face of the earth.
In Psalm 19 verse one, the Bible says,“The heavens declare the glory of God
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
Day unto today utters speech, andnight unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language wheretheir voice is not heard.” That passage
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says that the heavens above the skyup above us—all these things show the
power and the glory of God anywhereat any time on the face of the earth.
In Acts chapter 14, verse 17, Pauland Barnabas are in the city of Lira.
These are superstitious people, and theBible shows that Paul pointed them to
nature because God is the one and theonly one who could make this creation.
(14:16):
In Acts chapter 14, verse17, here's what they said.
“Nevertheless, He did not leavehimself without witness.” Now
they're talking about God.
God did not leave himselfwithout testimony.
God didn't hide Himself in the heavensand not reveal His power to man.
And how did He reveal Himselfto these superstitious people
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who didn't even have a Bible?
Well, the Bible showsus in Acts 14, verse 17.
He did not leave Himself without witness“in that he did good and gave us rain
from heaven and fruitful seasons, fillingour hearts with food and gladness.”
Where do these things come from?
How do we arrive at getting thesethings that we need in life?
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It's because of the goodness of God.
It's because of the design of God.
It's because we have, andthe world has, a Creator.
In Acts chapter 17, Paulis in the city of Athens.
This is a city that is full ofidolatry and also a city that is
renowned for the intellectuals.
Imagine that you have all ofthese supposedly worldly wise
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people, and yet you have a citythat is full of foolish idols.
So how does Paul address these people?
What does he say to them?
How is he going to talk to people thatdon't even believe in the true God?
Yet?
The Bible shows us in Acts 17,verse 24, that he took them straight
to nature, to creation, becausecreation points you to the Creator.
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In Acts 17:24, Paul said, “God, whomade the world”—there’s the key—“and
everything in it, since he is Lord ofheaven and earth, does not dwell in
temples made with hands.” Going downto verse 26, he said that God “has made
from one blood every nation of men todwell on all the face of the earth.
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And has determined their preappointedtimes and the boundaries of their
dwellings so that they should seekthe Lord in the hope that they
might grope for him and find him.
Though he is not far from each one ofus, for in Him we live and move and have
our being, as also some of your own poetshave said, For we are also his offspring.”
(16:30):
And then you have that powerfulpassage in Romans chapter one.
Here.
Paul teaches us that naturepoints us to God himself.
He shows us and teaches us that thecreation logically leads to the creator.
In Romans one, verse 18, Paul said,“For the wrath of God is revealed from
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heaven against all ungodliness andunrighteousness of men who suppress the
truth in unrighteousness, because thatwhich may be known of God is manifest
in them, for God has showed it to them;for since the creation of the world
His invisible attributes are clearlyseen , being understood by the things
(17:15):
that are made, even His eternal power andGodhead: so that they are without excuse.”
Even though we cannot fully understandwhy God made the world knowing that
the world would be filled with eviland suffering, what we do know and
what we must not ignore is thatthe creation reveals the Creator.
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We don't know the answer to why allthis happens, but one thing we do know
for sure is that God made this world.
Whatever we do, we must neverlet our ignorance of the one
lead us to deny the other.
That can be hard to do when you're hurtingso bad and feel so helpless that you feel
like your faith is at the edge of a cliff.
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Below you are the sharp,jagged rocks of unbelief.
You're standing on solidground, but you feel like it's
shaking and about to give way.
It's at that moment thateach person makes a choice.
You can consider the alternative tofaith in God, which is unbelief or
atheism, or you can back away from theedge of the cliff and think it through.
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More than that, you can get down on yourknees and humble yourself before God.
Now, if you take a leap of hate, whatI would call a leap of hate, hatred
of God, hatred of life, hatred ofyourself, then you will end up bitter,
miserable and estranged from God onthe jagged rocks of unbelief below.
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I call that a leap of hate.
It's a hatred of God.
You know, the Bible does talk about somewho hate God in Romans one, verse 30.
They didn't set out intending to hateGod, but they end up at that point
and it's usually because of a lot ofpain and a lot of suffering in their
life, and they get angry with God, thenbitter at God and then finally hate God.
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Now Christianity does notteach a leap of faith.
Many people talk about a leapof faith, but the Bible nowhere
tells us to take a leap of faith.
Our faith is not a leap.
It is not a leap of faith.
It is not a leap in the dark.
It is not a leap withoutfacts and evidence and proof.
If in a time of crisis you keepyour feet on the solid ground of
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facts and faith, you will recoverfrom this dark and trying time.
God will give you strength and rest.
Most people go through a crisis inlife that is so severe that they
eventually get to the point towhere they question God's justice.
Job did.
Others did in the Bible.
But that doesn't mean that weshould allow that kind of anger
to drive us away from God.
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This is why we need to spend moretime contemplating God's creation.
Now, that's more than just spendingtime with nature as people say.
A lot of people love the outdoors.
They enjoy the tall mountains, thebeautiful seas, the majestic stars, and
the breathtaking array of animals andbirds and fish and flowers, and trees that
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cover the landscape of our home on earth.
They love to go on vacationsand be close to nature.
But the sad part is they don't givea second thought about the God who
made all this, and they rarely feelthat they owe God anything in return,
even a prayer of thanksgiving.
They feel exhilarated in nature,but not humble enough to obey God.
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But as Christians, we see and feelmuch more when we look into nature.
We see the power of God in nature.
We see the love of God in His creation.
We see the wisdom of God.
We recognize who we are and howlittle and dependent we are on God.
David often marveled aboutthis in the Book of Psalms.
In Psalm eight, verse three,he said, “When I consider your
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heavens”—and let me just stop there.
How many times do we even do that today?
He said I am considering your heavens.
I'm looking at the heavens.
I don't just glance at them and thenhurry back to whatever I was doing.
He said I really think about it.
I ponder, I meditateon this vast creation.
Do you do that in your life?
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Do we take the time even to look upjust for a few seconds or a few minutes
and think about how great our God is?
That's one of the things that isa shortcoming in the lives of many
Christians today that don't spendenough time contemplating nature.
And what I'm saying to you in this lessonis that if you're going to deal with
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the problem of suffering and evil inthis world, and if you're going to live
with all of the trials in your life,you’re going to have to not only study
your Bible and pray to God, but you'regoing to have to look into creation.
You're going to have to spend more timecontemplating creation because the God
that can create and maintain and sustainall of this is the God that we depend
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on to get us through those trials.
If we believe that God created all thisby his mighty power, then there is no
reason we should doubt the fact that hewill see us through the hardships of life.
It's just as simple as that.
But if you and I are so busy that wecannot even take the time to look up,
then our faith is going to be weak.
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Now look again at what Davidsaid in Psalm eight, verse three.
“When I consider your heavens the workof your fingers, the moon and the stars,
which you have ordained, what is man thatyou are mindful of him and the son of man
that you visit him for? You have made hima little lower than the angels. And you
have crowned him with glory and honor.”
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Now, you will see this same kind ofthinking brought up in the Book of Job.
We will look at that later.
We are going to discuss, we're goingto talk about, the Book of Job, but I
just want to make a reference right nowto one thing in the Book of Job, and
that is that when you look at all thespeakers in that book, you have Job, you
have his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad,and Zophar, and then the young man named
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Elihu, and then you have God Himself.
So each one of these six talkedabout Job's suffering from the
standpoint of the creation, eventhough Job and his three friends
disagreed as to why he was suffering.
Every one of them at some point talkedabout and appealed to nature itself.
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They all talked about the fact thatnature or the creation backed up
what they were saying in some way oranother about the problem of evil.
When you look at the book of Job,you find that God, who is the last
one to talk, appeals to His creation.
He talks about nature itself.
He talks about what He has made andHe tells Job to consider this because
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He asked Job a lot of questions abouthis creation that Job cannot answer.
Now, the point is simply this (23:54):
Job thought that he had a case against God.
He looked at the evil, thesuffering in his life, and he
thought he had a case against God.
He thought that Godwas being cruel to him.
He says that in Job chapter 30, and sowhat God does, instead of arguing with
him and proving him wrong on the levelthat Job wanted to argue about, God
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simply takes him back to the creation.
And He says, Job, if you don't evenunderstand how and why I made, and how
I manage, and why I do the things withthe physical world that I do—the sun, the
moon, the stars, the animals, the seas,the frost, the hail, the lightnings,
the clouds, all this—if you don'tunderstand how I manage all this and
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why I put all these things into place,then how on earth do you think that
you know enough to criticize me becauseof what I allow or what I do or how I
manage the moral part of this life—thepart of human beings and their actions
and their morals and their choices?
You don't know enough about that Job,and so if we look into the creation, we
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are not going to get answers that willsatisfy us as to “Why, Lord?” but it
will help us to put that question intoperspective, and that really is what the
focus of this study is really all about.
Now, here's something elseto always remember about the
problem of evil and atheism.
Atheism is no answer becauseit always contradicts itself.
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Here's what I mean by that.
Atheists say that they cannotbelieve in God because of all
the evil that is in the world.
That is a contradiction.
Why?
Because if atheists are true,then God does not exist.
If there is no God, then thereis no real right or wrong.
That's the point.
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There is no evil in theworld if God does not exist.
Atheists don't have anything to point to,In the minds of atheists, there is no God.
That means that there is noultimate standard to say what
is right and what is wrong.
Now you have human beings obviously,you have people that say, “Well, I think
this is right, or I think that this iswrong.” You have people who say, “Eell,
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the majority of people seem to say thisabout right and wrong,” and then others
say, “Well, I disagree with that.” Aslong as you keep morals or ethics on a
human level, there's nothing objective.
There's nothing that really is absolute.
But if morals are absolute, if thereis anything that is objectively right
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or wrong in this world, then that meansthat there must be an ultimate standard.
There must be an objectivesource of right and wrong, and
that source can only be God.
It can't be man, because people differin their ideas of right and wrong.
You have to have some kind oflaw that rises above human law.
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I mentioned Anthony Flewjust a few minutes ago.
I want you to think about a debate thathe had with a gospel preacher named
Thomas Warren in 1976 in Denton, Texas.
This was at a time when Anthony Flu wasin his prime as an atheistic debater.
So brother Warren asked him the question: Did the Nazis commit real moral evil (27:06):
undefined
when they murdered 6 million Jews?
And Mr. Flew said well obviously they did.
Then Brother Warren asked him thequestion: what law did they violate?
He said the Nazis didn't violateGerman law because German laws
said that they should do it.
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They didn't violate the law ofGreat Britain because they were
not under the law of Great Britain.
They didn't violate the law of theUnited States because they were not
subject to the law of the United States.
So what law did they violate?
And Flew in that debate nevercould get out of that trap.
He never could dig himself outof that hole because if there
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is no God, there is nothing thatthose Nazis did that was wrong.
You can't say that theywere guilty of sin.
You can say that they maybe brokesome kind of law that you invent in
your mind or that you appeal to ona human level, but you can't really
say that they did anything that wasreally morally, objectively evil.
And that's what I'm talking about.
So it's an incredible thing that you haveall these very educated men, supposedly,
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and women who point to the evil that isin the world, the suffering that takes
place on earth, and say this is wrong.
This is evil, and the Godthat you Christians say you
believe in cannot exist.
Because if He was really allpowerful, He would stop this.
If He was really all loving,He would want to stop this.
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stop what?
And they of course will answer (28:34):
stop all the evil that is in the world.
But yet they've contradicted themselvesthe very moment they say that, because
if there is no God, there is no evil.
We're just dirt and rocks and dust.
We're just animals justlike any other animal.
And animals don't live on the basisof this is right and this is wrong.
When a tiger attacks or when aspider bites, we don't talk about
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that being sinful or evil or wrong.
They just do what they do.
And so people killing you, each other,people murdering each other, people
starving each other to death—whatever theatrocity is that you point to in life,
none of that is evil if there is no God.
So it is just absolutely incrediblethat atheists are so stubborn and so
prideful and so blind that they don'tsee that they're contradicting themselves
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at every turn because every time theybring up the problem of evil as their
reason for not believing in God,they are not only logically but also
inevitably contradicting themselves.
We need to teach our young peopleespecially to remember this
when they're confronted with theproblem of evil as a reason for not
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believing in God because it is not.
It is actually a reason for believingin God, and that's why we say atheism
is no answer to the problem of evil.
Thank you for listeningto My God and My Neighbor.
Stay connected with our podcast on ourwebsite, and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
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or wherever fine podcasts are distributed.
Tennessee Bible College, providingChristian education since 1975
in Cookeville, Tennessee, offersundergraduate and graduate programs.
Study at your level.
Aim higher and get in touch with us today.
Hi, I am Kerry Duke, host of My Godand My Neighbor podcast from Tennessee
Bible College, where we see the Bibleas not just another book, but the Book.
Join us in a study of the inspiredWord to strengthen your faith and to
share what you've learned with others.
A lot of people use the internet thesedays to learn about God and religion,
(00:22):
and out of all the searches for answersabout God, what question would you
say that people are asking the most?
Recent reports indicate that it's thevery question we've been talking about.
The age old problem of evil.
The top three questions in Google searchesaccording to the numbers are these.
(00:42):
Number one, why does Godallow suffering and evil?
Number two, does life have a purpose?
And number three, does God exist?
It's interesting that after thousandsof years, with all of our advances in
medicine and technology and other areas,mankind is still asking the same things.
(01:05):
Some questions just won't go away.
That's because some things don't change.
Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse nine iswhere Solomon said 3000 years ago, “The
thing that has been it is that whichshall be. And that which is done is that
which shall be done, and there is no newthing under the sun.” So it's encouraging
(01:31):
that God anticipated these concerns andHe addressed them in the Bible long ago.
These three questions are also connected.
I'm talking about the question,why does God allow suffering the
question, does life have a purpose,and the question, does God exist?
These are all interconnected.
The answer to one affectshow you answer the others.
(01:54):
And today in this lesson, we willsee that one popular approach to
the problem of evil will not work.
That approach is atheism, and we areabout to see why in this lesson that
we'll call “Atheism is no answer.”
You can say the same thing aboutagnosticism and skepticism.
Agnosticism is different from atheism.
(02:17):
It's the view that no one canbe sure whether God exists.
Atheism, on the other hand, triesto prove God does not exist.
It claims to know that God is not real.
Agnostics, on the other hand,believe we just can't be sure.
They are skeptical about everything.
They question what Christians say and evenwhat atheists say, and then they tell us
(02:40):
that no one can be certain either way.
They question everything, thatis, except their contention
that no one can know for sure.
But that's the very thing they claim tobe sure about—that no one can be sure.
So when these people—and I'm talkingabout agnostics—when they say they
don't believe in God because ofall the evil in the world, they
(03:02):
reason like a dog chasing its tail.
But an atheist looks at thesethree questions and gives a
definite answer to each one.
Why does God allow eviland suffering an atheist?
God is supposed to beall-powerful and all-loving.
A God like that, an atheist says,could not and would not allow all
(03:23):
the suffering and evil in the worlda. But since there is so much evil
in the world, the conclusion forthe atheist is God does not exist.
But if there is no God in atheisticthinking, then the atheist has to answer
the question (03:37):
Then why are we here?
What's the purpose of all this?
What's the meaning of life?
Now atheists answer thatthere is no purpose to live
or reason for us being here.
There is no meaning to life.
Where does that kindof thinking leave them?
Well, if there's no purpose for allthis, especially all of what they
(04:00):
call pointless suffering in the world,then how are we to feel about life?
So in the atheistic camp,there are two ways of thinking.
There are two different kinds of atheists.
Now there are more, but there aretwo basic kinds of atheists when
it comes to this problem of evil.
In regard to the question,What is the purpose of life?
What is the meaning of allthis?—some atheists dwell on
(04:24):
how empty and hopeless life is.
They live in a world of painand sorrow and violence, and
to them there is no answer.
There is no reason for us being here andno hope of where we're going [to them].
There is no God to help usmuch less to comfort us.
There is no heaven to go to when we die.
(04:45):
We live in a dark world and there isnothing that we can do about that.
The name for an atheist who thinkslike this is the word existentialist.
Now that word has a variety of meaningsin religious circles, but in the
philosophical world where atheismand skepticism reign supreme, an
existentialist is one who says, “We exist,we are here. Don't look for a reason
(05:11):
why or a purpose, just live with it,because there is no God to explain it.”
Now, obviously, this is a very gloomy,pessimistic, depressing outlook on life.
How could anyone think likethis without becoming suicidal?
And sad to say that's whatit sometimes leads to.
(05:32):
On the other hand, there are otheratheists who say, “You've got it
all wrong.” Getting rid of thethought of God makes them feel
good without God in the picture.
There are no rules.
There's no guilt.
There's no fear of hell.
Now, this camp of atheists don't thinka world without purpose is depressing.
(05:52):
They see it as a reason to celebrate.
It reminds me of what the Biblesays in First Corinthians 15,
verse 32 about people who donot believe in life after death.
Paul is basically saying there, ashe quotes the Old Testament in Isaiah
chapter 22, 13 and 14, “Let us eatand drink, for tomorrow, we die.”
(06:12):
So these atheists, in contrast to theexistentialist, try to be positive.
They try to be optimistic.
They see a bright future aheadwhere mankind can explore
and discover and create.
And if you ask them about all thesuffering and evil in the world,
if you ask them, “What about all ofthat? What are you going to do? How
(06:33):
do you deal with it?”—they will tellyou that they're working on that.
And in time they will tell you thathuman beings can eradicate things like
disease and crime and maybe even death.
Now this type of atheist is often calleda humanist, and they are very, very naive.
In fact, they're very dishonest aboutthe world and the facts about it.
(06:56):
They're also very arrogant.
In 1973, a group of renowned scientistsand educators wrote a manifesto
called the Humanist Manifesto Two.
In it, they stated their goalsfor a world without religion.
They say, “No deity will save us. Wemust save ourselves.” It's interesting
(07:20):
that this booklet talks about how atheismplans to deal with the problem of evil
and suffering in regard to morals.
This manifesto says thatnothing is absolute in ethics.
Nothing is right or wrong for everybody.
Every person decides whatis good or bad for him.
In regard to human suffering, itsays that people should work together
(07:41):
to have peace on earth and to putan end to things like poverty.
And one thing these atheistsagree on is that they don't need
God to accomplish any of this.
Now that's the humanist agenda.
But regardless of which view ofatheism a person holds, an atheist
will point to evil and suffering as areason why he does not believe in God.
(08:04):
Here are a couple of examples of men thatwere well-known atheists who were very
bold in denying God on that very basis.
So consider these men.
Robert Ingersoll was afamous orator in America.
He lived from 1833 to 1899.
He was so gifted and accomplished atpublic speaking that people would pay
(08:27):
money and fill places to hear him speakfor three to four hours on politics,
religion, and history, and other topics.
He was a notorious skeptic.
He ridiculed the Bible, he blasphemed God.
He loved to point to stories in the Biblelike the Israelites’ war against the
Canaanites, and then he would ask, “If thedevil had been in command of the Israelite
(08:51):
army instead of God, how could he havedone any worse than what God commanded
the Israelites to do when he told themto kill every man, woman, and child?”
So Ingersoll not only said he couldn'tbelieve in the God of the Bible because
of all the evil in the world, but healso said he didn't believe in God
(09:11):
because of all the evil in the Bible.
Now, there's much more that we could sayabout that in response, but right now
I'm simply pointing out some examplesof how people use this problem of
evil to reach the level of atheism.
Number two, we find a manby the name of Anthony Flew.
He lived from 1923 to 2010.
(09:32):
He was a brilliant, highlyeducated man by worldly standards.
He was a world-renowned atheistwho wrote, lectured, and debated
to destroy belief in God.
He said believing in Godwas like believing in the
tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.
But then after decades of fightingagainst God, he shocked the world
(09:52):
when he was in his early eighties byannouncing that he had changed his mind.
He decided that he couldno longer be an atheist.
He released his autobiography in 2007.
The title is, There is a God withthe subtitle How The World's Most
Notorious Atheist changed his Mind.
(10:15):
I was like a lot of peoplewhen I heard about this, so I
bought the book and read it.
I wanted to know, first of all, whatmade him decide to be an atheist to
begin with, and second, I was interestedin what led him to change his mind.
And I found both answers in the book.
Flew starts by telling us thathe was not an atheist always.
(10:38):
As a matter of fact, his father wasa Methodist minister, but he said
although it was hard for him to put hisfinger on any one thing that marked his
transition to atheism, he said there isone thing that affected him early on.
He admitted it.
It was the problem of evil.
Now, the Flew family lived in England,and Anthony Flew said that as a
(10:59):
young man, his father would takehim on trips to France and Germany
in the 1930s before World War II.
There he saw how the Germanswere mistreating Jews.
There he saw thousands of Nazisoldiers marching in support of Hitler.
He said in his autobiography thathe could not express in words how
(11:19):
deeply these experiences influencedhis very young mind, and as a
result, he became an atheist.
He could not see how anall-powerful, all-loving God
could allow such evil to exist.
Then after decades of being an atheist,after all those years of writing and
debating against God, he changed his mind.
(11:41):
Why?
It's simple.
It was, he says in hisown words, nature itself.
It was God's creation.
It had been right in front ofhim all that time, all his life,
but he was too proud to see it.
He finally came out and said, “I nowbelieve that the universe was brought into
(12:02):
existence by an infinite intelligence.”
Now those words “infiniteintelligence” are interesting.
That's the sad part abouthis so-called conversion.
He never said he believedin the God of the Bible.
The God of the Bible is not onlyinfinite in knowledge, but He's
also infinite in love and powerand justice and all his attributes.
(12:25):
So when Flew said that he changed hismind and became a believer in God, he
was talking about the God of deism.
Now, that's a God who made theworld, but has not intervened
with it since he made the world.
Now, that was a popular viewwhen the United States began.
Thomas Jefferson heldto that kind of view.
Thomas Paine was a deist as well.
And at the same time, Flew waslike a lot of people today.
(12:46):
A lot of people today want to believein God and say they believe in God,
but it's not the God of the Bible.
They say they believe in God, butthey don't want to answer to God.
They don't want to have rules from God.
So Flew died without believing inthe true God, without believing in
Jesus, and without believing in theBible as the inspired word of God.
(13:09):
He had turned to atheismbecause he thought it was the
answer to the problem of evil.
But in the end, he admittedit was no answer at all.
Now, one thing we do see in his storyis that there is no excuse for anyone
being an atheist because nature itselfshows the existence of God to everyone
(13:31):
everywhere on the face of the earth.
In Psalm 19 verse one, the Bible says,“The heavens declare the glory of God
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
Day unto today utters speech, andnight unto night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor language wheretheir voice is not heard.” That passage
(13:51):
says that the heavens above the skyup above us—all these things show the
power and the glory of God anywhereat any time on the face of the earth.
In Acts chapter 14, verse 17, Pauland Barnabas are in the city of Lira.
These are superstitious people, and theBible shows that Paul pointed them to
nature because God is the one and theonly one who could make this creation.
(14:16):
In Acts chapter 14, verse17, here's what they said.
“Nevertheless, He did not leavehimself without witness.” Now
they're talking about God.
God did not leave himselfwithout testimony.
God didn't hide Himself in the heavensand not reveal His power to man.
And how did He reveal Himselfto these superstitious people
(14:37):
who didn't even have a Bible?
Well, the Bible showsus in Acts 14, verse 17.
He did not leave Himself without witness“in that he did good and gave us rain
from heaven and fruitful seasons, fillingour hearts with food and gladness.”
Where do these things come from?
How do we arrive at getting thesethings that we need in life?
(14:59):
It's because of the goodness of God.
It's because of the design of God.
It's because we have, andthe world has, a Creator.
In Acts chapter 17, Paulis in the city of Athens.
This is a city that is full ofidolatry and also a city that is
renowned for the intellectuals.
Imagine that you have all ofthese supposedly worldly wise
(15:23):
people, and yet you have a citythat is full of foolish idols.
So how does Paul address these people?
What does he say to them?
How is he going to talk to people thatdon't even believe in the true God?
Yet?
The Bible shows us in Acts 17,verse 24, that he took them straight
to nature, to creation, becausecreation points you to the Creator.
(15:46):
In Acts 17:24, Paul said, “God, whomade the world”—there’s the key—“and
everything in it, since he is Lord ofheaven and earth, does not dwell in
temples made with hands.” Going downto verse 26, he said that God “has made
from one blood every nation of men todwell on all the face of the earth.
(16:08):
And has determined their preappointedtimes and the boundaries of their
dwellings so that they should seekthe Lord in the hope that they
might grope for him and find him.
Though he is not far from each one ofus, for in Him we live and move and have
our being, as also some of your own poetshave said, For we are also his offspring.”
(16:30):
And then you have that powerfulpassage in Romans chapter one.
Here.
Paul teaches us that naturepoints us to God himself.
He shows us and teaches us that thecreation logically leads to the creator.
In Romans one, verse 18, Paul said,“For the wrath of God is revealed from
(16:51):
heaven against all ungodliness andunrighteousness of men who suppress the
truth in unrighteousness, because thatwhich may be known of God is manifest
in them, for God has showed it to them;for since the creation of the world
His invisible attributes are clearlyseen , being understood by the things
(17:15):
that are made, even His eternal power andGodhead: so that they are without excuse.”
Even though we cannot fully understandwhy God made the world knowing that
the world would be filled with eviland suffering, what we do know and
what we must not ignore is thatthe creation reveals the Creator.
(17:35):
We don't know the answer to why allthis happens, but one thing we do know
for sure is that God made this world.
Whatever we do, we must neverlet our ignorance of the one
lead us to deny the other.
That can be hard to do when you're hurtingso bad and feel so helpless that you feel
like your faith is at the edge of a cliff.
(17:57):
Below you are the sharp,jagged rocks of unbelief.
You're standing on solidground, but you feel like it's
shaking and about to give way.
It's at that moment thateach person makes a choice.
You can consider the alternative tofaith in God, which is unbelief or
atheism, or you can back away from theedge of the cliff and think it through.
(18:21):
More than that, you can get down on yourknees and humble yourself before God.
Now, if you take a leap of hate, whatI would call a leap of hate, hatred
of God, hatred of life, hatred ofyourself, then you will end up bitter,
miserable and estranged from God onthe jagged rocks of unbelief below.
(18:41):
I call that a leap of hate.
It's a hatred of God.
You know, the Bible does talk about somewho hate God in Romans one, verse 30.
They didn't set out intending to hateGod, but they end up at that point
and it's usually because of a lot ofpain and a lot of suffering in their
life, and they get angry with God, thenbitter at God and then finally hate God.
(19:03):
Now Christianity does notteach a leap of faith.
Many people talk about a leapof faith, but the Bible nowhere
tells us to take a leap of faith.
Our faith is not a leap.
It is not a leap of faith.
It is not a leap in the dark.
It is not a leap withoutfacts and evidence and proof.
If in a time of crisis you keepyour feet on the solid ground of
(19:26):
facts and faith, you will recoverfrom this dark and trying time.
God will give you strength and rest.
Most people go through a crisis inlife that is so severe that they
eventually get to the point towhere they question God's justice.
Job did.
Others did in the Bible.
But that doesn't mean that weshould allow that kind of anger
to drive us away from God.
(19:48):
This is why we need to spend moretime contemplating God's creation.
Now, that's more than just spendingtime with nature as people say.
A lot of people love the outdoors.
They enjoy the tall mountains, thebeautiful seas, the majestic stars, and
the breathtaking array of animals andbirds and fish and flowers, and trees that
(20:09):
cover the landscape of our home on earth.
They love to go on vacationsand be close to nature.
But the sad part is they don't givea second thought about the God who
made all this, and they rarely feelthat they owe God anything in return,
even a prayer of thanksgiving.
They feel exhilarated in nature,but not humble enough to obey God.
(20:31):
But as Christians, we see and feelmuch more when we look into nature.
We see the power of God in nature.
We see the love of God in His creation.
We see the wisdom of God.
We recognize who we are and howlittle and dependent we are on God.
David often marveled aboutthis in the Book of Psalms.
In Psalm eight, verse three,he said, “When I consider your
(20:54):
heavens”—and let me just stop there.
How many times do we even do that today?
He said I am considering your heavens.
I'm looking at the heavens.
I don't just glance at them and thenhurry back to whatever I was doing.
He said I really think about it.
I ponder, I meditateon this vast creation.
Do you do that in your life?
(21:15):
Do we take the time even to look upjust for a few seconds or a few minutes
and think about how great our God is?
That's one of the things that isa shortcoming in the lives of many
Christians today that don't spendenough time contemplating nature.
And what I'm saying to you in this lessonis that if you're going to deal with
(21:35):
the problem of suffering and evil inthis world, and if you're going to live
with all of the trials in your life,you’re going to have to not only study
your Bible and pray to God, but you'regoing to have to look into creation.
You're going to have to spend more timecontemplating creation because the God
that can create and maintain and sustainall of this is the God that we depend
(21:58):
on to get us through those trials.
If we believe that God created all thisby his mighty power, then there is no
reason we should doubt the fact that hewill see us through the hardships of life.
It's just as simple as that.
But if you and I are so busy that wecannot even take the time to look up,
then our faith is going to be weak.
(22:20):
Now look again at what Davidsaid in Psalm eight, verse three.
“When I consider your heavens the workof your fingers, the moon and the stars,
which you have ordained, what is man thatyou are mindful of him and the son of man
that you visit him for? You have made hima little lower than the angels. And you
have crowned him with glory and honor.”
(22:42):
Now, you will see this same kind ofthinking brought up in the Book of Job.
We will look at that later.
We are going to discuss, we're goingto talk about, the Book of Job, but I
just want to make a reference right nowto one thing in the Book of Job, and
that is that when you look at all thespeakers in that book, you have Job, you
have his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad,and Zophar, and then the young man named
(23:06):
Elihu, and then you have God Himself.
So each one of these six talkedabout Job's suffering from the
standpoint of the creation, eventhough Job and his three friends
disagreed as to why he was suffering.
Every one of them at some point talkedabout and appealed to nature itself.
(23:28):
They all talked about the fact thatnature or the creation backed up
what they were saying in some way oranother about the problem of evil.
When you look at the book of Job,you find that God, who is the last
one to talk, appeals to His creation.
He talks about nature itself.
He talks about what He has made andHe tells Job to consider this because
(23:50):
He asked Job a lot of questions abouthis creation that Job cannot answer.
Now, the point is simply this (23:54):
Job thought that he had a case against God.
He looked at the evil, thesuffering in his life, and he
thought he had a case against God.
He thought that Godwas being cruel to him.
He says that in Job chapter 30, and sowhat God does, instead of arguing with
him and proving him wrong on the levelthat Job wanted to argue about, God
(24:17):
simply takes him back to the creation.
And He says, Job, if you don't evenunderstand how and why I made, and how
I manage, and why I do the things withthe physical world that I do—the sun, the
moon, the stars, the animals, the seas,the frost, the hail, the lightnings,
the clouds, all this—if you don'tunderstand how I manage all this and
(24:41):
why I put all these things into place,then how on earth do you think that
you know enough to criticize me becauseof what I allow or what I do or how I
manage the moral part of this life—thepart of human beings and their actions
and their morals and their choices?
You don't know enough about that Job,and so if we look into the creation, we
(25:03):
are not going to get answers that willsatisfy us as to “Why, Lord?” but it
will help us to put that question intoperspective, and that really is what the
focus of this study is really all about.
Now, here's something elseto always remember about the
problem of evil and atheism.
Atheism is no answer becauseit always contradicts itself.
(25:24):
Here's what I mean by that.
Atheists say that they cannotbelieve in God because of all
the evil that is in the world.
That is a contradiction.
Why?
Because if atheists are true,then God does not exist.
If there is no God, then thereis no real right or wrong.
That's the point.
(25:46):
There is no evil in theworld if God does not exist.
Atheists don't have anything to point to,In the minds of atheists, there is no God.
That means that there is noultimate standard to say what
is right and what is wrong.
Now you have human beings obviously,you have people that say, “Well, I think
this is right, or I think that this iswrong.” You have people who say, “Eell,
(26:08):
the majority of people seem to say thisabout right and wrong,” and then others
say, “Well, I disagree with that.” Aslong as you keep morals or ethics on a
human level, there's nothing objective.
There's nothing that really is absolute.
But if morals are absolute, if thereis anything that is objectively right
(26:29):
or wrong in this world, then that meansthat there must be an ultimate standard.
There must be an objectivesource of right and wrong, and
that source can only be God.
It can't be man, because people differin their ideas of right and wrong.
You have to have some kind oflaw that rises above human law.
(26:50):
I mentioned Anthony Flewjust a few minutes ago.
I want you to think about a debate thathe had with a gospel preacher named
Thomas Warren in 1976 in Denton, Texas.
This was at a time when Anthony Flu wasin his prime as an atheistic debater.
So brother Warren asked him the question: Did the Nazis commit real moral evil (27:06):
undefined
when they murdered 6 million Jews?
And Mr. Flew said well obviously they did.
Then Brother Warren asked him thequestion: what law did they violate?
He said the Nazis didn't violateGerman law because German laws
said that they should do it.
(27:27):
They didn't violate the law ofGreat Britain because they were
not under the law of Great Britain.
They didn't violate the law of theUnited States because they were not
subject to the law of the United States.
So what law did they violate?
And Flew in that debate nevercould get out of that trap.
He never could dig himself outof that hole because if there
(27:48):
is no God, there is nothing thatthose Nazis did that was wrong.
You can't say that theywere guilty of sin.
You can say that they maybe brokesome kind of law that you invent in
your mind or that you appeal to ona human level, but you can't really
say that they did anything that wasreally morally, objectively evil.
And that's what I'm talking about.
So it's an incredible thing that you haveall these very educated men, supposedly,
(28:11):
and women who point to the evil that isin the world, the suffering that takes
place on earth, and say this is wrong.
This is evil, and the Godthat you Christians say you
believe in cannot exist.
Because if He was really allpowerful, He would stop this.
If He was really all loving,He would want to stop this.
(28:33):
stop what?
And they of course will answer (28:34):
stop all the evil that is in the world.
But yet they've contradicted themselvesthe very moment they say that, because
if there is no God, there is no evil.
We're just dirt and rocks and dust.
We're just animals justlike any other animal.
And animals don't live on the basisof this is right and this is wrong.
When a tiger attacks or when aspider bites, we don't talk about
(28:57):
that being sinful or evil or wrong.
They just do what they do.
And so people killing you, each other,people murdering each other, people
starving each other to death—whatever theatrocity is that you point to in life,
none of that is evil if there is no God.
So it is just absolutely incrediblethat atheists are so stubborn and so
prideful and so blind that they don'tsee that they're contradicting themselves
(29:21):
at every turn because every time theybring up the problem of evil as their
reason for not believing in God,they are not only logically but also
inevitably contradicting themselves.
We need to teach our young peopleespecially to remember this
when they're confronted with theproblem of evil as a reason for not
(29:41):
believing in God because it is not.
It is actually a reason for believingin God, and that's why we say atheism
is no answer to the problem of evil.
Thank you for listeningto My God and My Neighbor.
Stay connected with our podcast on ourwebsite, and on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
(30:01):
or wherever fine podcasts are distributed.
Tennessee Bible College, providingChristian education since 1975
in Cookeville, Tennessee, offersundergraduate and graduate programs.
Study at your level.
Aim higher and get in touch with us today.
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