The Real Problem of Evil

“If God is good, why is there evil?” Some critics ask this question to try and discredit the Christian faith. Today, R.C. Sproul reminds us that there is an even more essential question that the skeptic must first answer.

Again, let me remind you of the severity of the problem that the Christian has to work with in this society. You know everybody’s raising the question, “If God is good, how’s come there’s evil?” The Christian is constantly left with the problem of defining the existence of evil in the world. Now, I have to say that there’s no way in which we can minimize the intellectual problem that’s involved in the question of evil. This is, if anything is, the Achilles heel, where all the arrows are directed to strike the fatal blow of the Christian faith, the origin of evil.

However, oddly enough, it’s only once we have decided that there is such a thing as goodness existing, that evil becomes a problem. We can’t even talk about evil unless we first assumed the good. The problem that the non-theist or the atheist has, is to account for the existence of good. Do you understand that? The guy who denies the existence of God has a much more difficult problem. He has the problem of ethics. In other words, what I’m saying is this, we do indeed have a problem with evil, but that problem is only there because of the existence of the good. And it’s not near the problem that the man has who denies God with the problem with the good.