Many atheists are genuinely troubled by the problem of evil.
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Evil confronts us no
t in abstract only but through bitter personal experience. It meets us in the cancer ward, the nursing home and the crematorium. It assaults us through the carnage of the evening news; it saps us through the daily monotony of failures, feuds and fading hopes. Every one of us knows evil.
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You may have realised that I am using the word “evil” very broadly to include moral evil (deceit, cruelty, pride, etc.), natural evil (disease, tsunamis…) and that last enemy, death. In the truest sense all these “evils” are unnatural, for they are disrupt the peace (shalom) of God’s good creation. They are all signs that things are not they way they ought to be.
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Not surprisingly, people find the experience of evil difficult to reconcile with the existence of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God. For many atheists this philosophical “problem of evil” is a compelling argument against belief. Eighteen of the essays in 50 Voices of Disbelief at least mention the problem of evil, and for five of these it is their main topic (the essays by Russell Blackford, Nicholas Everitt, Christine Overall, Stephen Law and Gregory Benford).
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It is unfortunate that some atheists wave around the problem of evil like a winning lottery ticket, just as it is unfortunate that some Christians dismiss it with flippant theodicies. (A theodicy is an attempt to justify God’s actions. I do not mean to imply here that all theodicies are flippant, merely that theodicies of the flippant variety are particularly regrettable). However, many other people, atheist and Christian alike, demonstrate a real sensitivity to suffering, often amplified by personal tragedy. Gregory Benford’s article ‘Evil and Me’, for example, is more a sigh of despair than a carefully reasoned case. Many atheists grieve at the injustice and suffering of our world, which seem so clearly to deny God and his goodness.
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So how ought Christians respond to this?
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