Can Love Exist Without Evil?: Evidence for God

And in the chapter today that we are discussing, chapter 12 on the problem of evil, there's a lot of comments initially about how God has made such a beautiful world for us to enjoy.

And in the midst of that, though, we see things like genocide, abuse, crime, all of this stuff.

Why do we see that if God is good and he's a lover of things that are beautiful?

Yeah, well, okay.

Well, that's a big question.

And, of course, a lot of people, on the basis of there is evil, don't believe that there is a God.

So their view would be that...

You know, DNA is produced by random mutations, and therefore people's behaviour is random.

Some people do good things, some people do, you know, do bad things.

And it's just that they're programmed, you know, that way.

It's just a random thing in the universe.

For me, though, actually, and it's interesting for the author of the article, John Pauline, who is a theologian and obviously believes in God.

To me, the fact that we have this contrast here occurring, and it seems to be extremes, you know, the examples that, you know, we can think of genocide, you know, where countries have have killed other people and tried to exterminate particular cultural groups, to abuse of innocent children, these sort of things.

We see a lot of really bad things that have happened.

But it's interesting that most people I talk to have a sense that that is wrong.

Yes.

That they're bad things.

And often people that do these bad things, when they're confronted with issues, say they change their mind.

They realise that what they did was wrong, which is a very interesting observation.

And to me...

The fact that we also have beauty, which gives pleasure, is spread throughout all these things.

So we associate, for example, a bad thing would be destroying beauty.

So people get very upset about destroying rainforests and this sort of thing, right? So this is an interesting concept that we have that if we were programmed, just automatically programmed with our DNA, why do we sense that something is wrong? Hmm.

So there seems to be a moral position there.

And for me, that because morality involves thoughts, which are non-material, our thoughts are non-material, as opposed to DNA, which is a material substance, it codes, it codes for the structure of our cells, the structure of our brain and this sort of thing.