If God isn’t there, we are forced to agree with the insane notion that creativity, art, speech, love, morality, justice, compassion and courage evolved by happenstance. What are the odds of that? While possible, the belief in such ingenious happenstance might take more faith than I’ve got.
Then there is the spiritual component of man. Wherever you go in the world people are innately religious. Atheism must be learned, while theism is reflexive, as is a belief in an afterlife.
So now you're saying, "But no one has ever proved there’s an afterlife."
What would you suggest? Have someone die, come back and tell us what it was like? It’s called a Near-Death Experience and they happen all the time. There is considerable uniformity to the experiences, and people do in fact continue to exist though their vital signs have flat-lined. I’m not sure what more evidence could be provided here.
Then there are all the existential issues that race through our curvy grey roads of cerebrum: assumptions that life should have purpose, people should be loved, we were made for something better, rights are inalienable. From wherest come thy existential hard drive?
And what of the moral side of man? Don’t we know torturing children is always wrong and not just culturally? If our morality is simply derived from society who was Martin Luther King appealing to when he indicted society for acting immorally.
Clearly, it must be a standard above or outside the society. Don’t we sense that helping a child is right and abusing one is wrong? Our minds are a virtual filing cabinet for the folders of what is good and evil.
All in all, I’m not happy with the problems that eliminating God leaves me.
It’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle and jamming two closely related pieces together. Even though those pieces couldn’t fit more snug, the whole rest of the puzzle doesn’t fit. And so you reason, perhaps, these pieces don’t fit together after all.
So I’m going to assume God is there, evil is there and somehow we can make the two jigsaw pieces fit without ripping the cardboard apart.
Perhaps a stroke of genius or ignorance on my part — you can be the judge — but it has always seemed that the Scriptures provide an insightful perspective on the problem of evil, as opposed to other religious books where evil came to us on the back of a sea turtle or somethinglike that.
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