From an intellectual perspective, the “Problem of Evil” is a very strange attack coming from Atheists. Yet it used to be one of the most common ones. “How can you believe in a good God and the existence of evil at the same time?” The strangeness comes down to this: Atheists ultimately don’t believe in evil, that is, if they are consistent within their own godless world-view. Evil is not some universal definition. It’s just a word that we humans attribute to things that feels wrong due to the times we coincidentally happen to live in.
If there is nothing beyond what can be measured—which is the necessary conclusion of the philosophy proclaimed by the New Atheists—then surely there is no such thing as objective moral absolutes. Evil did not exist as such before humans started agreeing that certain acts could rightly be labelled as such for the sake of our own comprehension and temporal preferences. I say “temporal” because Nietsche expected that we’d someday move “beyond good and evil” seeing that these are mainly religious concepts.
Yet, this is the challenge that Atheists present: ‘Explain the existence of Evil.’ They may even ridicule the numerous explanations that Christians have come up with in the history of Western thought. ‘Does the “free will” really necessitate all those genocides and famines and natural disasters?’ Perhaps not, who can really know, but that is beside the point. Because even if it doesn’t, it will always be the better explanation compared to the completely nonsensical Atheist response: “Well, theoretically speaking, evil doesn’t really exist outside of our minds, so we don’t need to explain it…”
Instead of trying to come up with a philosophy of reality that accounts for all aspects of evil, I think Christians should turn the tables. How do Atheists account for it? Saying that there’s nothing to account for is simply avoiding the question. Additionally, it’s self-refuting seeing that they keep requiring Christians to account for the existence of that which they don’t believe exists themselves.
‘Oh, but that’s different! If Christians believe it exists, they can be challenged on the basis of that very claim!’ Well, everybody believes Evil exists. Ask a random person on the street, ‘Would you say that the holocaust was truly evil?’ Ask him if he thinks that ‘it’s a matter of opinions?’ You really don’t need to dig that deep. Almost all people would agree from the outset: Some things are just pure evil! That’s what it means to be a moral person. Most people have morals to some extent, Atheists no exception. They know—and this kind of knowledge goes way beyond the empirical data—that some actions are just plain wrong and cannot possibly be justified by circumstances.
Now, if everybody agrees on the existence of something—the sky, New York, other minds—except those hardcore Atheists who are willing to say the most silly things to maintain a fallacious argument, then they are the ones who need to do some explaining! And I am confident that someday the loving judge will ask them to do just that.
The Loving Judge 