The Unbeliever’s Problem Of Goodness

This is chapter 13 of Randy Alcorn’s book If God Is Good In this chapter, Randy Alcorn tackles the unbeliever’s problem of goodness. You can find the previous chapters under the heading Bible Studies in the menu above. Unless otherwise noted, the Scriptures used are from the NKJV.

Chapter 13 in a Nutshell

Why does good exist? Those who argue that the Christian worldview doesn’t adequately account for evil need to explain how theirs can account for goodness. We have no logical reason to take good for granted; its existence demands an explanation. That we don’t question goods’ existence, affirms we consider good the norm and evil the exception.

How can good exist? Some of the world’s goodness can be described only as supernatural since from a naturalistic viewpoint we should all ruthlessly step on one another to survive. Without God, the world would be amoral, with no objective goodness or evil.

However, the world looks remarkably different than a world without God should look. The sacrificial good done by many Christians in the face of evil testifies to God’s existence. We see goodness even in unexpected places including in persecution and suffering. Our desire to live proves that good is greater than evil and that most suffering can be tolerated.

Despite its current flaws the world’s beauty and goodness testify to a Creator who designed it with order and purpose. Many have come to faith by contrasting the depths of evil and suffering with the goodness of Christians who responded to it.

The Problem of Goodness

Beginning with Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, a string of books promoting atheism hit top spots on the New York Times bestsellers’ list, including Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. Harris writes,

“If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. There is another possibility, of course and it is both the most reasonable and the least odious: the biblical God is a fiction, like Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods who most sane human beings now ignore.”

Sam Harris, Letter To A Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 55-56.

While atheists routinely speak of the problem of evil, they usually don’t raise the problem of goodness. But if evil provides evidence against God, then shouldn’t goodness count as evidence for him? Moreover, wouldn’t that be evidence against atheism?

From a non-theistic viewpoint, what is evil? Isn’t it just nature at work? In a strictly natural, physical world, shouldn’t everything be neither good nor evil? Good and evil imply an (ought) and an (ought not) that nature is incapable of producing. Augustine summarized the argument in two great questions:

“If there is no God, why is there so much good? If there is a God, why is there so much evil?”

Augustine as quoted by Peter Kreeft and Lee Strobel, The Case For Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2000), 45.

No Logical Reason to Take Goodness for Granted

Too many, only the second question occurs. But the first is just as important. If a good God doesn’t exist, what is the source of goodness?

Why does anyone feel gratitude? And why do people, even unbelieving survivors of a plane crash, so often thank God? Do people thank time, chance, and natural selection for the good they experience? No, because innately we see life as a gift from God.

People speak of gratuitous evil. However, what about gratuitous good, purely impractical, over-the-top good that seems to have no explanation?

Good is the Norm, Evil is the Exception

Doesn’t evil and suffering grab our attention precisely because they are not the norm in our lives? Our shock at evil testifies to the predominance of good. Headlines we consider terrible wouldn’t be headlines if they described usual events.

The atheist who points out the horrors of evil unwittingly testifies to good as the norm. The average person sees considerable good in the world. This may be why the great majority of societies believe that, despite evil and suffering, God is good.

Naturalism’s Worldview

The worldview of naturalism holds that physical matter is all that exists, and all phenomena can be explained by natural causes.

However, the Bible affirms:

• “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  – Genesis 1:1
• “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” – Genesis 1:31

Even in a fallen world, God’s common grace infuses goodness, restrains much evil, and implants a measure of it in the consciences of his image-bearers.

So how does naturalism explain the world’s goodness?

Setting aside the issues of how something can come from nothing and how life can come from non-life, great goodness and nobility pose a serious problem.

Why should we expect to find such goodness in the world that came through blind force, time, and chance?

The Christian worldview explains goodness as rooted in God, revealed by God, and rewarded by him. It gives reason for optimism to those who embrace it.

What explanation for goodness and what basis for optimism does naturalism offer?

• In the post-Enlightenment era, Voltaire asked, “How can God be so cruel?”
• In the pre-Enlightenment Reformation era, Luther asked, “How can God be so merciful?”

An Amoral World Without God

Where does goodness come from? How could it come from nothing? Why would people have such a strong sense of right and wrong? Why would the powerful sometimes sacrifice their lives to save the weak, handicapped, and dying?

Evolution can explain:

• greed
• selfishness
• insensitivity
• survival preoccupation
• a certain amount of ruthlessness

But does anything in the blind evolutionary process explain the demonstration of:

• kindness
• putting other people first
• risking your life to help a stranger

If so, what? How much good should we expect to see in an impersonal, self-generated world of mere molecules, chemicals, and natural forces?

Naturalism cannot explain:

• goodness,
• humility,
• kindness,
• compassion, and
• mercy, especially when exercised on behalf of the weak and the dying.

What should surprise atheists is not that powerful people crush those weaker than themselves, that would be entirely natural. The surprise is that powerful people would sacrifice their welfare to aid the weak. And yet, that very thing often happens.

If naturalism were an accurate worldview, the human race should welcome the death of the weak, diseased, and disabled, for its genetic betterment and its own survival.

Pitiless Indifference

Richard Dawkins wrote,

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless, indifference.”

Richard Dawkins, River Out Of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1995 ), 133.

• “Pitiless indifference” did not motivate Christians to care for those dying of the Black Death, at great risk to their own lives.
• “Pitiless indifference” did not take Father Damon to the lepers of Molokai, where he served for 16 years before dying of leprosy at age 49.
• Nor, on the other extreme, did “pitiless indifference” fuel the Holocaust. Rather, Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews because their hatred was so deep that it defied all natural explanation.

Suppose we believe in a Creator who made people in his image, fashioning them to make effectual choices.

Suppose those people chose to sin, condemning themselves to live under death and curse. However, God still blessed them with his providence and common grace.

In that case wouldn’t we expect the world to look as it does, with much goodness and evil coexisting? Randy Alcorn thinks the answer is yes.

Evils Done In Religion’s Name

Dawkins, Hitchens, and other atheists emphasize the evils done in religion’s name. However, they say virtually nothing about how modern education, science, and healthcare all emerged out of Christianity.

Consider the Red Cross, an organization that has done incalculable good to millions across the world. Compare this to the much-publicized witch hunts of old New England, or even the inquisition. (Randy Alcorn thanks Dinesh D’Souza for making this point while speaking at his church in October 2008).

While some professing Christians have certainly perpetrated injustice in the name of Christ, the numbers pale in comparison to the multimillions slaughtered by the eager disciples of atheists such as Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

While hatred of religion motivated Stalin and Mao, Hitler was a utilitarian who used everything at his disposal, including the nominal churches of Germany, to advance his evil agenda. (Many have mistakenly called Hitler a Christian; but in fact, he wrote,

“I shall never come to terms with the Christian life… Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.”

Jonathan Glover, Humanity (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000), 355.

Relief Organizations Funded By Atheists?

Look worldwide at the goodness you see, particularly at the groups and individuals dedicated to helping those who suffer. And then consider this:

• Where are the hospitals and the famine relief organizations funded by atheists?
• Where are the groups of atheists reaching out to drug addicts, troubled youth, and prisoners?

Matthew Parris wrote in the London Times a remarkable 2009 article titled “As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God.” He grew up in Africa and noted the profound difference in the goodness and resistance to evil he saw among Christians in contrast to unbelievers. He concluded,

“Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone, and the machete.”

Matthew Parris, “As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God,” Times (London), December 27, 2008, WWW.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_ parris/article5400568.ece.

Testimonials

Phillip Hallie – Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Phillip Hallie’s marvelous book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed tells the true story of Le Chambon, a French town where Pastor André Trocmé’s church, under the Nazi occupation, provided Jews with food, shelter, protection, and means of escape.

Despite the disapproval of many, the pastor and his church persevered in doing what they believed was right. As a result, “Le Chambon became the safest place for Jews in Europe.”

See Historical Pictures HERE

The Holocaust cruelty obsessed Hallie. He said he’d become “bitterly angry” and “over the years of studying the Holocaust I had dug myself into hell”. Hallie speaks of a life changing day when he discovered the stories of Christians and Le Chambon rescuing Jews, at the peril of their own imprisonments and death.

You can continue to read this awesome story on Randy Alcorn’s ministry site: https://www.epm.org. Goodness in a World of Evil: Philip Hallie and the Story of Le Chambon

Eleanor Stump

Philosophy professor Eleanor Stump tells of coming to know Jesus through studying the problem of evil and suffering. Reflecting on her own experience (and Hallie’s), Stump writes:

“So, in an odd sort of way, the mirror of evil can also lead us to God. A loathing focus on the evils of our world and ourselves prepares us to be the more startled by the taste of true goodness when we find it and the more determined to follow that taste until we see where it leads.

And where it leads is to the truest goodness… to the sort of goodness of which the Chambonnais’s goodness is only a tepid after taste. The mirror of evil becomes translucent, and we can see through it to the goodness of God….

So, you can come to Christ contemplating evil in a world of goodness or contemplating goodness in a world of evil.”

Eleanor Stump, “The Mirror Of Evil,” in God and the Philosophers, ed. Thomas V. Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 235.

Thomas Schmidt

Thomas Schmidt tells of an old woman he met in a nursing home. Blind and almost deaf, Mabel was 89. She had lived there for 25 years and now sat strapped in a wheelchair. The cancer eating her face had pushed her nose to the side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so she drooled constantly.

Schmidt handed Mabel a flower and said, “Happy Mother’s Day”.

She tried to smell it. “Thank you,” she said, her words garbled. “ It’s lovely. But since I’m blind, can I give it to someone else?”

When he wheeled her to another resident, she held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.”

Schmidt asked, “Mabel what do you think about when you lie in your room?

She replied, “I think about my Jesus.”

Schmidt asked, “What do you think about Jesus?”

She spoke slowly and deliberately, “I think how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good…. I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied…. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.”

Then Mabel started singing, “Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all. He is my strength from day to day.”

Thinking of this woman bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, cancer eating her for the past 25 years, Schmidt said,

“Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening, and yet she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it?”

Thomas E. Schmidt, Trying To Be Good (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1990), 180-83, quoted in William Lane Craig, Hard Questions, Real Answers (Wheaton IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 109-10.

The only good answer to that question is it’s supernatural. The Jesus Mable loves is the Jesus who sustains her.

In Closing

This same Jesus is where I get my strength. I wanted to share the above stories from If God Is Good to encourage you to place your hope in Jesus. He NEVER FAILS. He is a husband to the widow of which I am one, a father to the fatherless. Jesus is the safe place for the fearful, he is the savior of our souls and so much more. I love him so much.

Without Jesus there is no hope there is no reason for life. It is no wonder that atheists can only see evil and misery. Because of their misery they have rejected the ONE who made them in his image, Jesus the Christ. Please don’t make the same mistake. Therefore, I must ask you this question.

Do you have a relationship with Jesus? Have you allowed your relationship to stagnate? Fall in love with him again.

Maranatha! Until next time, I am Passionately Loving Jesus, the Anchor of my Soul.

Elderly woman photo by Dani Franco on Unsplash