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Who Made God? Chapter 2: TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT EVIL by Ronald Rhodes
In early 1999, my brother’s son Greg was hit by a car and killed. After the funeral service, the question that happen?” It is the same question people through the ages have asked whenever tragedy strikes: Why do bad things happen to good people? And what does it say about God that such things occur? Just think what the friends and relatives of the almost three thousand people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, must have wrestled with.
Pollster George Barna was once commissioned to inquire of people what one question they would ask of God if they had the opportunity. By an overwhelming margin, the most urgent question was: “Why is there so much suffering in the world?”
My goal is to briefly examine some of the tough questions about evil. I book, not just a short chapter. Abbreviated treatments always run the risk of superficiality. I urge the reader to supplement my brief treatment with some of the more exhaustive works cited in the endnotes and in the suggested resources listed at the back of this book.
Before getting to the questions, be good to record a few preliminary thoughts about evil. Evil is not something that has an existence all its own; rather, it is a corruption of that which already exists. Evil is the absence or privation of something good. Rot, for example, can exist only as long as the tree exists. Tooth decay can exist only as long as the tooth exists. Rust on a car and a decaying carcass illustrate the same point. Evil exists as a corruption of that which already exists.
Norman Geisler tells us, “Evil is like a wound in an arm or moth-holes in a garment. It exists only in another but not in itself.” 3 Of course, to say that evil is not a thing in itself is not the same as saying that evil is unreal. Evil may not be an actual substance, but it involves an actual privation in good substances.
Who Made God? Chapter 2: TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT EVIL by Ronald Rhodes
Who Made God? Chapter 2: TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT EVIL by Ronald Rhodes