Acts 17:31 · NKJV
If God Is Real, Why Is There So Much Suffering?
0:37 Short
What does Acts 17:31 say?
We'll say it up front: this is the objection we find hardest. Not the one we find easiest to dismiss. The hardest.
J. L. Mackie set it out in "Evil and Omnipotence" (Mind 64:254, 1955) and again in The Miracle of Theism (Clarendon Press, 1982). The structure is simple and that's what makes it heavy. An omnipotent being could remove suffering. An omniscient being would know how. A wholly good being would want to. Suffering exists. Mackie's conclusion was that the three claims can't all be true together.
Most replies to Mackie work by adjusting one of those terms — arguing that a good God might permit suffering for reasons we're not positioned to see, or that free creatures capable of love are worth the cost of creatures capable of harm. Those replies are serious, they're not obviously wrong, and none of them will feel adequate to somebody in the middle of it. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and we're not going to hand you a tidy answer for a child's cancer ward.
What the episode does is put this objection first, at full strength, before making any case at all. If an argument for God can't survive being placed next to this one, it isn't worth much.
Acts 17:31 (NKJV): "because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead." Christianity's answer to suffering is not that it doesn't matter. It's that it will be answered for.
Full episode: https://youtu.be/BAa1tVmLk7Q
Bible references
Scripture in this video is quoted from the NKJV.
Transcript (show)
And we will not pretend the atheist arguments are stupid. They are not. Some of the smartest people alive hold them. Let's name them first. There are four arguments a thoughtful atheist will bring.
In their strongest form, they are these. One, the problem of evil. Philosopher JL Mackey put it this way. God is omnipotent. God is wholly good.
And yet evil exists. There seems to be some contradiction between these three propositions. If God is all powerful and all good, why the cancer ward?
Transcript from the video's captions on YouTube.
